Review by ken_mayer

My wife and I have started watching period dramas in bulk since she fell into the Downton Abbey wormhole. We've now watched almost all of first season Poldark. Poldark at its best is almost as good as Downton Abbey at its worst, by which I mean that the dialog and plotting is so predictably bad that you can no longer pretend that you are not watching a soap opera with better costumes. That rarely happened in Downton, at least in the first few seasons.

In Poldark, the heroes are all good and the villains are cartoonishly bad/evil/slutty/weak. The heroes act like enlightened souls from the 21st century. One has to suspend one's disbelief every 5-10 minutes, not just from anachronisms but more because the characters would be unbelievable in any century. One of the joys of MadMen was seeing *everyone*, even the good characters, basing their actions on an outdated moral compass.

We have managed to get through so many episodes because the main actor is good looking enough to fascinate my wife and enough of an actor to convincingly spout the moody dreck he's given to say and do. We're looking for some other period drama, stat. Based on the reviews here, maybe we'll check out the 1970s Poldark.