Penny Dreadful

John Logan's Penny Dreadful launched in May 2014 as a Showtime and Sky Atlantic co-production and ran for three seasons and twenty-seven episodes, until June 2016. Logan (by then an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, with Gladiator, The Aviator, Hugo and the Bond films Skyfall and Spectre to his name) wrote every episode of all three seasons himself, an unusual single-author commitment for a premium-cable drama on this scale.

Eva Green leads the cast, 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, and the series qualified for Irish film tax credits despite its London setting. Cinematography rotated over the run, with Nigel Bluck and PJ Dillon as the principal directors of photography.

The series received several BAFTA TV Award nominations and won an Emmy for Outstanding Sound Editing. Eva Green won a number of British and American critics' awards for her performance, and it is one of the finest 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 it was cancelled.