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The Arthurian Legend on the small screen: Starz’ Camelot and BBC’s Merlin

Merlin

The Arthurian Legend on the small screen: Starz’ Camelot and BBC’s Merlin

By Ingrid Nygard

Master’s Thesis, University of Oslo, 2013

Merlin

Introduction: The story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table has endured for a thousand years. It has been told and retold countless times, in novel form, as poetry, on stage, and on screen. Its lasting appeal can be attributed both to its timeless fairy tale motifs, and to its ability to reshape itself to the tastes and needs of its evolving audience.

When Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote Idylls of the King in the mid-nineteenth century, he was addressing Victorian society’s fears about the newly revealed nature of man. T. H. White’s five-novel series The Once and Future King is a treatise on the politics of war, very much relevant in the mid-twentieth century, and a few decades later, Marion Zimmer Bradley made feminism a theme of her novel, The Mists of Avalon, and yet all three of these tell essentially the same story.

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These are all literary examples, however, and today, while Arthurian novels are certainly still being written, they seem to be largely relegated to the Science-fiction & Fantasy shelf of your local bookshop, with its accompanying narrow market. Instead, it has fallen to Hollywood to keep King Arthur in the minds of the masses, and the results are many and varied. It is not the triumphs and failures of the big screen, though, but those of its little brother that this thesis is interested in, because in recent years there have been no less than two serious takes on the legend made for TV, BBC’s Merlin (2008) and Starz’ Camelot (2011).

Merlin began as a light-hearted family affair, but grew predictably darker over the course of five seasons, culminating in the battle of Camlann, and the death of King Arthur. The series was created by Shine, an independent producer, for the BBC, who wanted a family show in the vein of Doctor Who and Robin Hood (2006). It was to be a “three generation” TV show, meaning it could be watched by children, parents and grandparents, and naturally that meant it had to be family friendly (Deans: “BBC seeks magic touch”).

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Four men are credited as the creators of Merlin: Julian Murphy and Johnny Capps, who also were executive producers, and Jake Michie and Julian Jones, who wrote more than half of the show’s episodes between them. Murphy and Capps went on to create Atlantis (2013), a show similar in tone to Merlin, but Merlin is their biggest success so far.

Click here to read this thesis from the University of Oslo

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