History Will Vik You Up

When I think History Channel, I don’t exactly think quality programming. Entertaining, sure; if nothing else you can always depend on a regular marathon of WW2 programming, and it’s never not fun to watch the Nazis lose. But by and large, well, what you see is what you get and what you see is this:

The logo’s right there. They can’t get away from it.

So when I heard that History was running an original drama series called Vikings, well, I figured Xena: Warrior Princess was about the ceiling of expectations. I’m not sure exactly why I decided to give it a shot – maybe because low expectations are a blessing – but I did, and four episodes into the first season, Vikings is…good. Like, a legitimately pretty good TV show. I’m not really sure how to process it, but I’m going to try.

The premise is pretty straightforward – it’s 793, and a bunch of Scandinavians are getting set for the summer raids. They usually go east; charismatic young warrior Ragnar Lodbrok* wants to sail west for the unexplored lands of England. Paranoid, ironfisted Earl Haraldsen doesn’t want to give him a boat to do so, so Ragnar gets his own damn boat and indeed sails to England, where he and his crew sack a little monastery at a place called Lindisfarne, kicking off the Viking Age and starting a political mess back home to go with it.

Chronicled much more accurately by Kate Beaton.

*(LOATH-bruk, with a hard “th” like “the.” Also, it means “Hairy-Breeks,” as in “britches.” Thus far the furry pants have yet to appear in the show.)

Let’s get the weak shit out of the way – Earl Haraldsen, and indeed most of this non-specific Viking community, are portrayed as not only not being familiar with England but not knowing it exists. With all the suspicion and mockery of “lands to the west,” I thought for a bit this show was going to be a take on Erik the Red colonizing the Americas; as it turned out, this is just a particularly geographically illiterate bunch of Vikings. And that initial hiccup colors the Earl, in whom sadly the investment of kickass character actor Gabriel Byrne has yet to yield returns. He’s meant to be a paranoid autocrat, but the script choices don’t give Byrne much to do so far but brood, sneer, and make increasingly bad decisions. As a primary villain, he falls flat.

Luckily, as a primary villain, he’s mostly just there to give the audience excuses to root for the ostensible good guys. I mean, look – the major conflict of the first couple episodes is an argument over where our protagonist should go raiding. Which enemies to crush, where to see them driven before him, and in what language to hear the lamentations of their women. Part of investing the audience in an anti-hero is giving them a worse villain, and Earl Haraldsen does that, if a little clunkily; the other half is making the anti-hero awesome, and that’s where Vikings really hit on the nose.

Ragnar is played by Australian actor and (no shit) former male model Travis Fimmel, and four episodes in, people are already calling this a breakout role; it’s not hard to see why. Playing a literally legendary figure whose charisma and ambition are proposed to have launched the Viking Age is a big hairy pair of pants to wear, but Fimmel steps into them with a sly smirk that keeps the audience at arm’s length and lets Ragnar’s unpredictability and guile speak for themselves. Add in a dose of Viking Family Values (good dad, loving husband, loyal brother) and, well, being kinda ridiculously good-looking, and he’s an easy barbaric pirate to root for.

Your innocent expression isn’t fooling anyone, Ragnar.

Ragnar’s wife, Lagertha, is an ass-kicking shield-maiden who probably enjoys a good fight even more than he does; Katheryn Winnick gets some real clunkers in her dialogue but she’s doing her best. His brother Rollo (Clive Standen) is his ruthless, savage right hand, predictably conflicted in his loyalties but at least interestingly so. The cast is rounded out by a batfuck crazy shipwright who is either the god Loki or is doing his best to act like it, real-life giant terrifying Viking Vladimir Kulich as an in-show giant terrifying Viking, the Earl’s skeezy court of skeezy Norsemen, and a captive English monk who serves as an audience surrogate and has the potential to be a standout character, if George Blagden (last seen getting drunk and then shot in Les Miserables) can keep him from getting boring. It’s hard to be interesting when you’re the only guy who doesn’t think getting on a boat, stealing your neighbors’ shit, and burning down what’s left is awesome.

Strong as the cast is, shows like this have botched better casts recently; see Starz’s Camelot (featuring the aforementioned Mr. Standen), which even the likes of Eva Green, James Purefoy, and Joseph Fiennes couldn’t save. Camelot makes a good comparison because there were really two things that sunk it – first, the central character was played by lightweight Twilight alum Jamie Campbell-Bower, nobody’s idea of a King Arthur. Vikings struck gold with Travis Fimmel and avoided the same problem, but there remains the trap of, well, unspeakably bad writing.

I’m pleased to say that despite some of the issues mentioned above, the core of the show is strong. The dialogue is a little stylized but not flowery or ham-fisted, and with the exception of the Earl, all of the characters are as well-motivated as they need to be. And the History Channel gets to show off a little, too – the translation convention has all Old Norse dialogue delivered in English, of course, but any time multiple languages are in play they start to play around with that. One memorable scene between Norse and Anglo-Saxon warbands really takes advantage of that; the languages are just close enough that the two groups can guess at what their counterparts are saying, and the language choice does a great job of conveying the tension, suspicion and fear that might otherwise not be present in a long shot of two packs of hairy people standing on a beach.

Floki the shipwright, a well-balanced and scholarly craftsman.

Game of Thrones this isn’t (though it’s clear that someone at the History Channel was thinking about it); the budget is not quite that high and no matter how much they want to have naked Vikings, they can’t. But it’s not embarrassing either, with good costumes, well-shot and well-trained fight scenes, and reasonable SFX when they need them. They filmed in Ireland (also like GoT!) and took advantage of some really gorgeous scenery, with one shot in particular (the bay around the harbor town Earl Haraldsson rules) never ceasing to make me go “Whoa” no matter how many times they show it.

Overall, this is a show that is probably not going to vault into the ranks of great TV, though I’ve been surprised before. Assuming it doesn’t, though, it’s absolutely good television, and well worth a watch if you’re into the swords-and-treachery thing going around the small screen now. It diverges enough from the limited historical record to avoid being totally predictable, but isn’t blatantly unbelievable either (aside from the Earl not knowing about frigging England), and has already introduced all sorts of untapped potential. And best of all, it’s only four episodes in, so you don’t have seasons of archives to sort through! If the History Channel can avoid trying to do too much with Vikings, they might have a serious thing* on their hands.

(*Norse pun)