New Bernard Cornwell show The Winter King is no The Last Kingdom

I first read Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles in middle school. I’d seen a few other King Arthur things here and there, but nothing quite grabbed me like this. It was epic without being cheesy, nuanced without being boring. It featured a cast of characters most of us have heard of — Arthur, Merlin, etc — but had a different perspective on them. They were real people situated in a real time and place in history, where the idea of magic was treated with such fear and respect that it might as well have been real, even if no one was shooting lightning bolts out of their fingers.

I devoured The Winter King, the first book in the series, and quickly read the next two. For years I thought they would make a great TV series. And now MGM+ has gone and made it. And the first episode is…pretty lame, all things considered. We know that Cornwell’s work can make for good TV; just look at the Sharpe series starring Sean Bean, or the Netflix show The Last Kingdom. In my opinion, The Warlord Chronicles is Cornwell’s best work, so I’m very disappointed that MGM+’s The Winter King is such a middling effort.

The TV show seems intent on taking everything that made Cornwell’s books different and interesting and boiling them away. The books revolve not around Arthur or Merlin but Derfel, a young pagan boy who in time will become a warrior in Arthur’s service. In the book, we see him grow up at Merlin’s compound at Ynys Wydryn (changed to Avalon in the series, I guess because they figure people might recognize the name). He has a youthful flirtation with Merlin’s lover Nimue, learns about the strangeness of Christians and the threat of the Saxons, and finally meets characters like Arthur and Merlin well into the story. When they arrive, it’s a huge moment.

Derfel is in the show, played by Stuart Campbell, but The Winter King chooses to foreground Arthur and Merlin, since it expects us to expect them. But one of the cool things that Cornwell’s books did was give us a different perspective on the Arthurian legend. Derfel is the main character, a witness to the events of this famous story. And in seeing those events through his eyes, we see them in a new way. By bringing in Arthur (Iain De Caestecker) and Merlin (Nathaniel Martello-White) so early, The Winter King becomes like pretty much any other version of the Arthurian legend, only a bit grimmer and nastier.

The Winter King gets off to a rocky start on MGM+

Much of the historical context of The Warlord Chronicles is stripped away. In Cornwell’s books, there’s a lot of tension between paganism and Christianity, then growing in influence on the isle of Britain. In the books, Arthur’s father Uther is a pagan who gets fed up with the Christian attendants helping his wife Norwenna through labor, so he calls for folks from Merlin’s camp to take their place. The show hints at this tension, but it’s never felt as real, never like it’s affecting how the characters think and behave.

In fact, nothing in this first episode of The Winter King feels very important. The characters speak in declarative statements about themselves that tell us who they are in bullet point form, but nothing about why we should care care. (Derfel: “I’m a warrior.” Merlin to Nimue: “You will become the most powerful druid in Britain.”) . Most of the characters speak and act more or less the same, with precious little personality on display. In the books, Merlin is a bit of an eccentric old coot. In the show, he’s…bland. Wise and a leader and bland.

My favorite moment from the premiere is when Merlin’s priestess Morgan (Valene Kane) spitefully tears a crucifix out of the hands of the extremely pregnant Norwenna, then in labor. That moment reminded me of the high-riding bitch Morgan is in the books, which was nice. But it’s a tiny character moment in an episode far more concerned with convincing us of how epic it is than in developing the characters who could make it so.

So yeah, I didn’t like this. I’ll keep watching for a while to see if things improve, but this was…ugh, this kinda hurt, I won’t lie.

Episode Grade: D

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