Reign Review: Episode One: "Pilot"

I watched the series premiere of Reign on The CW last night, and it has sufficiently gotten me hooked. I expect to be doing reviews of each episode either here or on my Youtube channel just like I do for Legend of Korra, Twisted, and How I Met Your Mother.

I began seeing commercials for Reign late last week while I was home for fall break, and I was immediately intrigued by it. I love period dramas, and there's not a lot of it on television, at least not that I'm aware of. I really hope Reign doesn't get canceled because people aren't interested. I think you can tell from the pilot that they've tried very hard to make it appealing to all teenagers, not just ones already interested in period dramas.

There is so much drama happening amongst the royals, and while too much drama is typically a turn off for me, it becomes so much more intriguing to me when it's amongst royalty. I know next to nothing about the historical background of the show, so I can't say how accurate everything is so far. After watching, I was tempted to look everything up, but I've refrained so far. I'm betting they took a lot of creative license with the show, but I still don't want to see anything that will ruin the show for me.

The only thing that's really getting me at this point is all of the English accents. The characters are all Scottish and French, yet they all have English accents. (Modern English accents at that, but I won't get into that.) The actors aren't even English (well some are but not all), so they're purposefully having them speak in fake English accents. It gets to me. That's something that's going to bother be for the entire course of the show.

As for the actual story, I've become really intrigued. I've already gotten that a good deal of the character have almost no strong morals, so who knows what we'll be seeing happen over the course of the show. Having Nostradamus as a character was interesting. I'm very intrigued by him and his goals. It will be fun to see if they go with the route of him believing he's legitimately seeing the future or if he's manipulating everyone by making things up. Whichever way it is, the queen definitely seems to believe his visions are legitimate, even if that doesn't excuse her actions in my eyes.

The romance in the show looks like it's going to be a mess. I'm sure it will be all over the place. Mary and Francis would be cute together I think, but I also like her chemistry with Sebastian. Of course, if we believe Nostradamus, then Mary and Francis are going to end tragically. This is one of the things I'm really tempted to look up, and we'll see if I manage to hold off on that.

Oh, I have to make a quick mention of Anna Popplewell (Susan from the Narnia movies) is one of Mary's handmaidens. That was a nice surprise. She was the only actor that I recognized from something else.

I'm going to go wait impatiently for the next episode. Fingers crossed that I don't look something up and ruin it for myself. The urge is hard to resist at the moment.