Dracula - NBC

I enjoyed last week's premiere of Dracula a great deal more than I expected to.  I enjoyed it enough to look forward to the next episode. Evidently, I am not the only one to be pleasantly surprised.

It's too bad that the attraction is not in the actor, who, as Dracula, is the center of the series, Jonathan Rhys Meyers.  Being Stoker's Dracula, by definition then, evil, perhaps we don't want Dracula to be appealing?  So far, as Meyers projects him -- that slicked flat hair, the signature Meyers' hooded eyes, facial ornaments, Dracula seems more like one of those stereotypical oily latin lovers or latin villains of which the early decades of the 20th century were enamored on stage and screen.

So wherein does the appeal lie?  Perhaps in some of what captured my support in the later episodes of Ripper Street* -- a sense of a society on the move, embarked on rapid change, and excited by these changes, not intimidated by them, or jaded by them.  This is a society that does not yet even imagine WWI and is tremendously excited by electricity.  This can perhaps be described in that now convenient catch-all term, steampunk, in which bounds of European Empires, we pale folks -- and who is more pale than a vampire? -- can safely celebrate.  But like Ripper Street, the divisions of class and corruption, poverty and crime, the persistence of these matters' threats to the comfortable segments of society, are all present, if foregrounded more in the metaphor of vampirism and ancient secret societies, whose underground wars with each other are also played out in front of the eyes of the overground population -- those whose eyes are open enough to see them, anyway.

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*  Ripper Street's second season began this last week on UK television.  I loved the opening of the review for it in The Guardian, here:

According to the rules of television, there are only three characters capable of driving a plot in Victorian London: prostitutes, murderers and murdered prostitutes.

About which very thing last spring I fulminated here, and here too.

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to Ripper Street's second season, particularly since the Guardian review stated that this time out it seems no prostitutes were murdered in the course of our entertainment.