The Transformed Beast:Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic
After only one eight-part season, the television series Penny Dreadful, a Showtime/Sky Atlantic co-production, had already become an international success with an active and vocal fanbase. Yet the relationship of the show (which was created and written by John Logan) to the Victorian serial fiction genre, penny dreadfuls, is an oblique one, and worth unpicking. The first part of this article focuses on the task of teasing out the connections between Penny Dreadful and the penny dreadful genre, arguing that the show's title performs significant cultural work in positioning itself in relation to Victorian fiction and in relation to modern television. In the second part of the essay, I explore how Penny Dreadful works as an adaptation, using Kamilla Elliott's insights into the contradictory and overlapping concepts of adaptation in Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Finally, the essay considers Penny Dreadful as a reflection – and, it is argued, an appropriation – of contemporary media fandom.