REVIEW: Titanic (TV)

I have just witnessed a maritime disaster but not in the way that ITV intended. A review of ITV’s new period television drama ‘Titanic’ by me, A J Hodson.

downton abbey fellowes itv television titanic

I have just witnessed a maritime disaster but not in the way that ITV intended. Titanic attempts, over the course of four episodes, to chronicle the exploits of a variety of characters before and during the sinking of said doomed vessel. This new miniseries is written by Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, who has somehow squandered an idea that had so much potential.

Well, it started out OK, I guess. We get some meagre character development of the Manton’s, an upper class family who are somehow aristocratic. We get to know Lady Manton whose only personality trait seems to be turning her nose to everyone, upper class or not. Lord Manton is even more one-dimensional. I don’t even want to talk about the storyline for Lady Georgina and her American lover which seems to be a watered down version of Jack and Rose’s from James Cameron’s blockbuster Titanic. The only difference is that they share a whopping two scenes together before becoming infatuated.

 

From thereon in we get little more than glimpses and fragments of plot and character. The script relies heavily on the viewers knowing those famous names from history such as Ismay and Guggenheim. In fact, it assumes we will know them and uses that as an excuse to refrain from developing them at all. They are, in all honesty, presented singularly as names with little to no defining features, relying too much on the audience knowing the history of the Titanic.

 

There are far too many characters for the screenwriter to possibly handle in an hour (over 89 characters, in fact, across the whole four episodes), most of them dispensable or irrelevant and, as such, it is very difficult to get a grip on what is happening. These characters scurry in and out, someone steals a brooch, there’s something about an iceberg, and before you know what’s what it just sort of ends rather too abruptly.

The pacing was completely off. Before I had even sat down the ship was sinking. I realise that this is a four part mini-series and so the writers will be plugging (if you’ll excuse the pun) some of these puzzling gaps in the storyline, but rather than intrigue us or draw us into a mystery, these gaps seemed to be more of an excuse to leave character arcs and storylines unfulfilled. We know so little about the characters or their situations that these gaps are confusing rather than intriguing. There is too much mystery, too many holes in the story. This is not helped by an odd transition at the halfway point of the episode to the very day of the sinking.

 

There was no tension whatsoever. I felt no fear for the ship or the characters simply because there was no build-up. The actual impact with the iceberg was merely a blip. It came out of nowhere and left little impact, well, at least upon the audience. In fact, the iceberg left little impact upon the characters either, with most of them refusing point blank to get into the lifeboats. It is at this moment that Fellowes really labours the tensions between classes, with various characters refusing to enter the lifeboats based upon the fact that they will be sitting with people of the lower classes, and this is really enforced to the point where is feels farcical, exaggerated and ludicrous, not to mention melodramatic.

I understand the idea behind this program, the idea of interweaving the storylines of various characters throughout the series, essentially reiterating the sinking each week no doubt, is rather clever in its conception but that is no excuse for sloppy character development. I can’t help but feel that, unlike the lifeboats, the script was too cluttered and overcrowded with characters a plot threads that Fellowes has struggled to cram into his hour-long running time. Why not simply focus on the Lord Manton entirely, give us one point of view, and limit our confusion by stopping the head-hopping from person to person? A TV program with this much scope, with this kind of scale needs a longer running time per episode and a much longer series. Four episodes just will not cut it.

This was such a disappointing beginning to a series, but the fault of the above problems lies with the screenwriters. It was impeccably acted and designed. The ship looked incredibly authentic for a television production. It looks so much better than it actually is, making it as stylish as Downton Abbey but without any of the substance.

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