'Marco Polo' - Season 1 on Netflix

Game of Khans

One of the side effects of the success of 'Game of Thrones' and 'Vikings' has been the return of big budget medieval shows. I don't thinkI've seen any rendition of the Marco Polo story since the 1980s with Kenneth Marshall in shelled role. All those 80s Miniseries (which ought to have been pronounced to rhyme with 'miseries') made for some tedious viewing as they stretched stories out to fill screen time and they just don't bear watching today.

But that's all a long time ago. TV is now a lot more hip to the narrative needs of the public. better writers are working better craft with bigger budgets. At least, that's the theory.

The success of 'Game of Thrones' and 'Vikings' has opened the way for a new shot at the old story. The unshaven grimy leather-clad mud-stomping sword-wielding, shield clanging, siege-engine-mounting, arrow firing, horse-riding thing just got a whole lot more currency. Who did the most damage with this stuff in real life (yes, without summoning dragons)? Mongols!

So it's of to medieval Mongolia we go.


What's Good About It

Benedict Wong plays Kublai Khan. Central to the mythos of the Mongol Empire in Marco Polo's telling of it, is Kublai Khan, Khan of Khans as chosen by the Khanate. Khan he Khonquer China? That's the question. Benedict Wong's diction is quite Hong Kong, with clipped gutturals and throaty vowels, but he fills the costume very well. You go look up pictures of Kublai Khan and yes, Benedict Wong really is well cast. The other Mongols are not as well cast as Kublai, and really, Benedict Wong carries the show.

He's like a big Chinese Charles Laughton, magnificent and grand with a touch childish petulance. You don't see the chubby Asian guy get such prominent role in American TV so perhaps this is a show that is possible only because it's on Netflix.

What's Bad About It

You can take some amount of historical inaccuracies. This show takes gobs liberties with history to the point that it's simply nonsensical. I'm sure they tried to have things somewhat accurate because they shot the great steppeland exteriors in Kazakhstan and it looks amazing. The wardrobe and production design look authentic and well researched. The siege of Xiangyang is a lot more interesting than they portrayed it in this series.

It also falls into the trap where the romantic interest has to rewoven in so they can get the requisite sex scenes going. And these all slow down the interesting parts of the story.

Some the acting is not as good. The guy playing Jingim, son of Kublai is not great. He's asian in looks but his body language is wrong. The guy playing Byamba is also dodgy. They're on much better terrain with Chinese people playing the Chinese, but that is to be expected. Even so, they really screw up Jia Sidao into a rather dislikable villain. I'm not so sure that was a good move.

For all my complaints, it is however a far cry from this sort of travesty. Or this kind of puffery.

What's Interesting About It

The snippets of Mongol culture that get introduced to the screen are interesting. The politics is much less interesting. There's really not a whole lot to the depth in the casting. The level of acting is really uneven. You feel like the world of Mongols and the Chinese cuts out about 1m from the edge the frame. It's very precarious in a way that a TV series about Americana is never this vulnerable to the suspension of disbelief being blown.

The problem really is that the really interesting sweeping historic stuff can only be told from the Mongol point of view. As long as it is told through the eyes of Marco Polo, we're effectively getting the keyhole view of the culture. It's basically 'Dances With (blue) Wolves' with the same cultural politics. It's amazing how the American view of itself keeps retranslating into this kind of colonialist fodder.

All of the results in the story of the Mongol ascent and conquest being told in a ham-fisted way and told around the person of Marco Polo as if he were more important in these events than he was in real life.

Colonising The Body

Of course, it's about a white male going deep into uncharted terrain. He meets lots of exotic women an gets told he's a barbarian but ends up shagging them. The classic colonial trope on the race and gender totem pole. Don't know about you but the identity politics in this one is as garbled as it can be. Maybe this is kind of what it takes to mount a series around the Mongols.

The Mongols of course come over like Klingons from the Star Trek universe, what with their studded leather armour and the interesting hairdos. You could almost intercut some of these scenes from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' and not miss a beat. It kind of goes to show that the settings and costumes change but the ideological operation is the same behind most of this TV product. That much is the same old disappointment.

What is abundantly clear is that at least in television, America is still much better at examining itself than its context in the world. The kind of finesse and nuance expressed in things like 'House of Cards' or 'Mad Men' is totally absent in this series. It's more like a floundering tour through a reimagined Mongol Empire with a haphazard tour guide. I'm pretty sure if real Mongolians watched this series, they'll spew. It will probably look like medieval Mongolia, but not on this planet.

Will They Make More Of These?

I don't know about the future longevity of this show. The cries are bad, the ratings only so-so, and they're bad signs. They've already compressed the campaigns into a season. I'd be interested in seeing if they push this out to the two attempts to invade Japan. That would be kind of cool. I don't think anybody has brought that to the screen with any credibility. But then I don't know that there's much to go on with this whole series.

The thing probably needs to have a bigger budget to look better but it might be pushing shit up hill. Truth be told I just want to watch more of Benedict Wong's Kublai Khan. I'd take it even if it were a sitcom. He is in some ways, the most interesting alpha male since Don Draper, and it's like hardly anybody's noticed.

Besides which, there's no sign of Xanadu yet. Kublai Khan's capital is Khanbaliq which is now modern day Beijing. There's a lot left untouched, unsaid, but you keep thinking you may never get to see it because this series is going to get axed. They need something better going; better writing, better direction better performances. It's a shame because there's enough there to really push this out in to something special.