Appetite for fright

In our post-Anne Rice world, small-screen vampire dramas such as the BBC’s Being Human, HBO’s True Blood and the CW’s Vampire Diaries have all been fairly successful. Even Moonlight could have clicked had CBS given it more time, but it was cancelled after only one season, right before the release of Twilight in 2008. NBC’s Dracula, which premiered last week, is but the latest take on the popular trope.

To set itself apart, Dracula takes a novel approach. It has chosen to focus not on sex-crazed Southerners or brooding teenagers, but on figures spawned by Bram Stoker’s imagination. The 10-episode series begins with an exhumation in Romania in 1881 before the plot moves forward by a decade. Landing in late-Victorian London, the same era as Stoker’s book, Dracula is now posing as American businessman Alexander Grayson. He forms an unlikely alliance with the vampire hunter Van Helsing to exact revenge on a powerful group called The Order of the Dragon.

Allegory for the times

Created by Cole Haddon and produced in association with Sky Living, the group in charge of airing it in the UK, this version feels like an allegory for the times. Dracula, as Grayson mimicking Nikola Tesla, introduces a method of wireless electrical transmission that threatens to devalue The Order’s oil interests. It appears that the real bloodsucking villains are the nasty industrialists — the one-percenters — who exploit the poor for personal gain. That Dracula was shot in Budapest, replete with decadent interiors and costumes, provides the initial sizzle.

The Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers — best known to television audiences, perhaps, for his portrayal of Henry VIII in The Tudors — seems born to play a fanged insurgent battling oligarchs. His dirty, louche vibe, however, only does so much to stoke the melodrama. There was a well-executed rooftop fight scene in the pilot which showed a side of London that Mary Poppins did not. Still, I could not help but conclude that Dracula was contrived merely to imitate cable television. It has the requisite genteel blandness of a period series and none of Vlad the Impaler’s ruthlessness to act as a foil.  

There, too, were times when Dracula reminded me uncomfortably of Revenge and Arrow, with Emily Thorne and Oliver Queen conflating into a caricature of Victorian perceptions of American identity. No one vogues better than Rhys Meyers, once a Hugo Boss fragrance model, but his put-on American accent is too distracting, making it far too easy to imagine him as Ed Westwick playing Chuck Bass.

Stakes are high

That said, I plan to give Dracula a fair shot and see it through to the end. I want to discover how the Stoker characters evolve, particularly the young reporter Jonathan Harker, played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen, whom I recall from the historical drama World Without End; and his girlfriend Mina Murray, brought to life by Arrow’s Jessica De Gouw. The British thespian Nonso Anozie is likewise magnificent as R.M. Renfield, the Alfred Pennyworth to Dracula’s Bruce Wayne. At least his American accent is believable.

But more than that, I want to see how this miniseries intends to play with vampire mythology, if it does so at all. Will the Count be able to turn into a bat or a wolf? And will he fear garlic, holy water, crosses and stakes? While I don’t expect Dracula to come close to Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful 1992 film  — Gary Oldman was both terrifying and sympathetic — I don’t want it to suck (pun intended) either.

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