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Ignobly Ignoring the Past
Mar. 31st, 2007 08:36 amEvery new detail I learn about the Henry VIII miniseries just makes me weep fresh tears of blood. Why do people take actual history that was fascinating and lustful and dangerous and exciting and jazz it up with a bunch of random cliches and meaningless changes? (It's not just this team, which is giving the royal screwover they gave Elizabeth to her daddy as well. I'm also looking at you, Mr. "Hawaii wasn't interesting enough the first time so I needed to add stock characters" Michener.)
What's making it doubly painful is that I'm in the middle of doing Henrician research for the work-in-progress, so all the details that they're rewriting are fresh in my mind. It's bad enough that we have to take mandates about the viewers being too stupid to know the difference between Mary-the-king's-sister and Mary-the-king's-daughter from a bunch of morons who don't know the difference between the King of France and the King of Portugal. (This has led to a certain amount of hilarity in a friend's journal as we try to figure out how they're going to deal with the inconvenient fact that Henry's six wives had only three names between them.)
No, this morning I read that the dickswing that was the Field of the Cloth of Gold somehow wasn't exciting enough as is. I mean, the real thing was only such a pissing contest that I'm surprised that the rivers of France don't still run yellow, but that wasn't good enough, apparently. So they've got to add a wrestling contest because a joust wasn't... visual enough? Thrilling enough? And a broken treaty because that's so much more of a plot twist than slapping a good face over bad faith to begin with.
We won't even go into "Margaret's" behavior. It's amazing the treason she was getting up to in Portugal while she was hanging out in Scotland...
And I thought that PBS piece of shite with Helena Bohnam Carter as an unwilling Anne was screwed up!
What's making it doubly painful is that I'm in the middle of doing Henrician research for the work-in-progress, so all the details that they're rewriting are fresh in my mind. It's bad enough that we have to take mandates about the viewers being too stupid to know the difference between Mary-the-king's-sister and Mary-the-king's-daughter from a bunch of morons who don't know the difference between the King of France and the King of Portugal. (This has led to a certain amount of hilarity in a friend's journal as we try to figure out how they're going to deal with the inconvenient fact that Henry's six wives had only three names between them.)
No, this morning I read that the dickswing that was the Field of the Cloth of Gold somehow wasn't exciting enough as is. I mean, the real thing was only such a pissing contest that I'm surprised that the rivers of France don't still run yellow, but that wasn't good enough, apparently. So they've got to add a wrestling contest because a joust wasn't... visual enough? Thrilling enough? And a broken treaty because that's so much more of a plot twist than slapping a good face over bad faith to begin with.
We won't even go into "Margaret's" behavior. It's amazing the treason she was getting up to in Portugal while she was hanging out in Scotland...
And I thought that PBS piece of shite with Helena Bohnam Carter as an unwilling Anne was screwed up!
