By Parker Sublette
Staff Writer
Netflix’s newest series Frontier tries to take a somewhat boring subject and turn it into the next Game of Thrones by making a series about the history of the North American fur trade. While Frontier intrigues with impressive acting, realistic set design, and an original concept, it falls short with a scattered plot, uninteresting characters, and excessive gore.
Photos: Check out images and stills from “Frontier.”
The series dives into the world of 1700’s Hudson Bay fur trading and spends most of it’s time following the exploits of Declan Harp (Jason Momoa) a half-Irish half-Native American man bent on revenge against the British run Hudson Bay Company.
It is quite hard to find a piece of media that’s completely original in its concept, but Frontier is a breath of fresh air in a world of sequels and spiritual successors. While Canadian history might not seem like the best idea for a show, Frontier’s dramatization of a seemingly unexplored genre is one of the show’s better aspects.
Frontier is made to be quite the immersive viewing experience due to it’s very accurate and well built sets along with as its realistic costume designs. Both aspects work together to make the show much more convincing in its portrayal of history based events.
While Jason Momoa is the biggest name heading the cast of Frontier, the entire cast does a great job at bringing to life the characters despite the poor writing of the show. In fact, the acting is one of the few parts of the show that prevent it from being unwatchable. The cast is convincing in their performances and give realistic portrayals of their characters.
Link: Read up on the cast and crew of Frontier.
While the acting is quite good, the characters themselves are uninteresting. Despite the excellent performance by the cast of Frontier the characters being portrayed are poorly written and boring. Frontier is a very action packed show in which the characters are at constant risk, but the writing fails to make the audience actually care for any particular character and detracts from the show itself.
Link: Read other reviews of Frontier.
In its attempts to seemingly copy the style of Game of Thrones, Frontier is riddled with gorey and carnage-filled depictions which seem to be an attempt to add to the grittiness of the show, but instead end up detracting from the realism the costumes and set design had initially done a good job of establishing.
The biggest pitfall in Frontier’s first season is its scattered and disconnected plot. At first the show seems to be focused on Declan’s revenge story and a small cast of side characters, but each episode adds more and more characters each with their own confusing backstory and surrounding plot. This mess of a plot structure just leaves the audience confused and bored rather than intrigued as it is intended to.
All in all Frontier is an interesting show with an original concept that fails horribly to capture its audience due to a confused plot structure, poorly written characters, and excessive gore all of which overshadow the great acting and realistic set design.
The first season of Frontier is available to stream on Netflix now.
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