Series
Penny Dreadful
In late-Victorian London, a haunted spiritualist named Vanessa Ives joins forces with an aristocratic explorer searching for his missing daughter. Their investigation pulls in figures lifted from the gothic literary canon — Dorian Gray, Victor Frankenstein, Dracula — into a single shared underworld of séances, hauntings and unspoken sins.
About
John Logan's Penny Dreadful launched in May 2014 as a Showtime / Sky Atlantic co-production, running for three seasons and twenty-seven episodes through June 2016. Logan — by then an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for Gladiator, The Aviator, Hugo and the Bond films Skyfall and Spectre — wrote every episode of all three seasons himself, an unusual single-author commitment for a premium-cable drama of its scale.
The cast is led by Eva Green, with Timothy Dalton (in his first major television role), Josh Hartnett, Reeve Carney as Dorian Gray, Harry Treadaway as Victor Frankenstein, Rory Kinnear, Billie Piper and Helen McCrory. Production was based largely at Ardmore Studios outside Dublin, with location work in London and across Ireland; the series was eligible for Irish-Republic film tax credits despite its London setting. Cinematography rotates across the run, with Nigel Bluck and PJ Dillon as the principal directors of photography.
The series received multiple BAFTA TV Award nominations and won an Emmy for Outstanding Sound Editing. Eva Green's performance — for which she won several British and American critics' awards — is widely treated as among the most accomplished television lead performances of its era. A 2020 Showtime spin-off, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, set in 1930s Los Angeles with a separate cast, ran for one season before cancellation.
Top Cast
Eva Green
Vanessa Ives
Josh Hartnett
Ethan Chandler
Timothy Dalton
Sir Malcolm Murray
Harry Treadaway
Dr. Victor Frankenstein
Reeve Carney
Dorian Gray
