You’ve seen him take multiple arrows to the body in Lord of the Rings. You’ve seen his head become detached from the rest of him on Game of Thrones. And you’ve seen him die a plethora of other deaths in a thousand other movies and TV shows. He is Sean Bean, and his next small screen effort The Frankenstein Chronicles is coming to the U.S., although whether or not he lives to the see the final episode’s credits is entirely up in the air. “Bet lightly” is our advice.
Bean will soon be seen in the genre-mashing The Frankenstein Chronicles, a horror-tinged crime drama that was acquired by cable network A&E, according to Variety. Because the show is inspired (though not quite directly) by the seminal Mary Shelley novel, you might be thinking that Bean will be playing a monster of some sort, which would seemingly dictate his fate. But he’s actually the good guy here.
The Frankenstein Chronicles takes place in London in the 1800s, and stars Bean as Inspector John Marlott of the Thames River Police. After a squad of opium smugglers are brought to justice, a child’s corpse is discovered and throws everything into chaos. Because it’s not actually a child’s corpse at all; it’s a collection of body parts from several different child corpses. (Now you get where the whole Frankenstein monster angle comes into it.) Marlott goes on the prowl to find the killer – or maybe killers? – and gets thrown headfirst into Georgian London’s seedy underbelly, where drugs, sex, bodysnatching and murder are just a handful of the atrocities happening on a regular basis.
At this point, The Frankenstein Chronicles is set up as a miniseries, with six episodes produced to tell this tale. Depending on how the story goes, and how many breaths Bean’s character is taking by the last episode, we might get to see more from this world if it becomes a hit with critics and audiences. Considering it’s a British production, I’m thinking it’ll earn its fair share of acclaim.
This will be Sean Bean’s second current series on the air, as he’s also alive and well on the TNT crime drama Legends. And this will be the second current horror-ish show for A&E, which is still riding strong with the Psycho prequel Bates Motel. The network will also be celebrating Halloween with a special in which people get buried alive. Call me when they have one where they make participants sew body parts together.
Created by The Young Poisoner’s Handbook writer/director Benjamin Ross and Torte Bluma writer Barry Langford, The Frankenstein Chronicles doesn’t yet have an airdate set on A&E, but we can probably expect one to be announced fairly soon.
