Why Can’t Every TV Show Be As Entertaining As ‘The Last Kingdom’?

The Last Kingdom, with three seasons streaming on Netflix, is quite possibly the most entertaining sword-and-royalty show this side of Game Of Thrones. We’ve reached a kind of film-history singularity. By this point, no year in the endless Saga Of Britain has gone undocumented. This one relentlessly covers that wacky period in the late 9th and early 10th centuries, long before the birth of Channel 4, where England wrenched itself out of the nit-picking muck to become a semi-unified nation.

Our chosen monarch is Alfred The Great, crowned King Of Wessex after his brother gets stuck in battle by some filthy Danes. Wessex dangles at the bottom of the island like a rich-soiled pseudopod, constantly under assault from enemies within and without. If Alfred fails to defend the realm, we realize with some urgency, there will be no tea and crumpets in England’s future. The Great British Baking Show will never exist.





Alfred, played with sallow-eyed wit and wisdom by David Dawson, bravely rides into battle on occasion, but he’s more of a scholar king, a type rarely seen on TV. He spends much of his time in the library, writing laws and chronicling his struggles, and the rest of the time wasting away from some unnamed chronic illness, possibly extreme gluten intolerance.

Other characters, real people you may or may or may not have heard of, include the smarmy Aethelred the Unready, the noble and sexy Aethelfled, Lady Of Mercia, and Aethelwold, Alfred’s weaselly nephew who somehow becomes Lord Of Northumbria. Disappointingly to fans of I Love Lucy, there is never a character named Aethelfred. Nor does Aethelmerman ever appear.

The majority of the action in the show, adapted from eleven insane but entertaining novels by Bernard Cornwell, centers around Uthred Ragnarsson, “Britain’s greatest warrior.” Uthred, played with eight winks, a ridiculous accent, and a ton of swashbuckle by the German actor Alexander Dreymon, is a Saxon lord who gets kidnapped as a kid by Viking marauders in the pilot, gets raised by a Danish chieftain, and somehow ends up being the Lord Protector of the Realm by virtue of the fact that he’s the only white man in the world who can effectively rock a goatee and a ponytail.





Uthred longs to reclaim his lordly estate, but like a lot of busy people in the capitol, he can’t ever seem to arrange to get up north for the weekend. Even though he relentlessly kicks ass, he endures more tragedies than a half-dozen Shakespeare protagonists. Every time someone dies, it’s his fault. He’s sworn to protect all the important people, which he does effectively, even though everyone he actually loves seems to suffer nasty fates.

Whenever Wessex or Mercia who whoever he’s currently pledged to succeeds in battle, Uthred doesn’t get to enjoy himself because he does or says something stupid. He gets banished more often than the average political journalist tweets. His loyalties swing back and forth between Alfred and the Danes, sometimes twice in each action-packed episode. At one point he becomes a galley slave, and he nearly dies twice after being cursed by two separate witches. After every tragedy, he has some sort of vision of a ghost and then hops back on his horse, grabs a piece of mutton, and yo-ho-hos off to battle while Alfred pukes into a chamber pot. Wow, it’s great.





also features a full cast of Danish weirdoes. Most of them are filthy and dumb, clomping around with bones in their beards while killing priests. But some of them have heroic moments, as opposed to many of the Saxon characters, who appear to be slithering their way into the history books. The scenes in the Danish camps, where they’re screwing and drinking and shouting and whacking at one another with hatchets, are among the show’s best.

The Last Kingdom walks the line between historical realism and high camp. At times, it veers close to self-parody, to Norsemen or Monty Python And The Holy Grail territory, but it never steps over the edge, partly because it refuses to take itself too seriously. At the same time, outside of the ridiculously melodramatic main storyline, it’s totally committed to the historical record. It may be one Bruce Campbell guest shot away from becoming Xena: Warrior Princess, but it never quite goes there. Occasionally, an episode flags, but then there will be an exciting swordfight in a nunnery, and you’ll find yourself thinking “Why can’t every TV show be like this?”

Neal Pollack is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.





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