User:Vllhoward/Penny Dreadful (TV series)

Penny Dreadful is a horror drama television series created by John Logan, who also acts as executive producer alongside Sam Mendes. The show was originally pitched to several US and UK channels, and eventually landed with Showtime, with Sky Atlantic as co-producer. It premiered at the South by Southwest film festival on March 9 and began airing on television on April 28, 2014, on Showtime on Demand. The series premiered on Showtime in the United States on May 11, 2014, and on Sky Atlantic in the United Kingdom on May 20, 2014. After the third-season finale on June 19, 2016, series creator John Logan announced that Penny Dreadful had ended as the main story had reached its conclusion.

The series is set in the 1800s, mainly in London, and follows a company of characters taken from or inspired by 19th century British fiction as they encounter and interact with supernatural forces. Characters include Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), Ethan Chandler (Josh Harnett), Malcom Murray (Timothy Dalton), Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), and Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney).

The title refers to the penny dreadfuls, a type of 19th-century British fiction publication with lurid and sensational subject matter. The series draws upon many public domain characters from 19th-century Victorian Gothic fiction, including Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray; Mina Harker, Abraham Van Helsing, John Seward, Renfield, and Count Dracula from Bram Stoker's Dracula; Victor Frankenstein and his monster from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; and Henry Jekyll from Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, showing their origin stories as an explorer searches for his daughter. Justine from Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue by the Marquis de Sade also appears.

A spin-off series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, premiered on April 26, 2020.

Plot
The first season begins in London, 1891. Ethan Chandler, an American gunman and roadshow artist, is hired by the adventurer Malcolm Murray and the mysterious Vanessa Ives to help rescue Murray's daughter from a mysterious creature. They seek out and receive help from a young doctor named Victor Frankenstein, who is hunted by an undead man of Frankenstein's creation. Ives becomes romantically involved with the handsome, artistic Dorian Gray, but also finds herself haunted by Lucifer who wishes to make her his bride and queen.

In the second season, Ives is hunted by a coven of witches led by the charismatic Evelyn Poole, wanting to bring Ives to Lucifer, who is their master. Frankenstein is forced to make his creature a bride, and an inspector hunts Chandler after a grisly murder he committed in an inn.

In the third season, the main characters find themselves scattered across the world. When Count Dracula appears in London, the final battle for Vanessa Ives' soul begins.