“Reign” Is Not the Best Show on TV, but It May Be the Greatest
If there is one thing that consistently disappoints me about the CW’s super-hero fare, it is its inability to harness the genre’s capacity for soapy DRAMA. Set in worlds where aliens are real and there exist people in possession of powers that turn them into gods, it somehow often manages to fall flat. Perhaps it has something to do with a lack of commitment: a world with superheroes should be drastically different from our own, and yet showing us what that world would actually look like is a step the genre rarely takes, with its most famous creations. Due to their existence as both CW shows and super-hero shows, there’s a certain baseline for its characters and stories, which often leads them to believe that fighting equals drama.
A lack of DRAMA has never been Reign’s problem. Developed by Laurie McCarthy and Stephanie SenGupta (although the latter left early in production, leaving McCarthy as showrunner) The CW’s exploration of the life of Mary Stuart left no stone unturned in its search for plot, using every tool available in order to spice up the lives of their characters. Some of it is taken from real-life history and the tumultuous reigns of its characters. Some of it is taken from ye olde book of period dramas—lots of political marriages up in here, even for characters who did not exist in actual history. A lot of it just soap opera, with a 16th century bent: somebody being a secret protestant is a plot twist here, which is just fantastic. Reign, in general, is a lot, which gives it a lot of the appeal of a good Pretty Little Liars episode or one of the better Lifetime movies, where you’re left wondering just how it is the characters arrived at this point.
Chasing Sheep 