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**Chris** · 04-11-2019, 10:17

It was well produced, and my youngest loved it (she’s a big fan of the Potter films so it’s right up her street). I enjoyed it as a piece of event TV. It’s good to see the BBC acknowledging that the golden age of TV we are now in is in large part driven by the fantasy genre, which our public service broadcasters pay far too little attention to.

However, I still don’t really like Pullman as a writer in this genre. Where fantasy is used as a lens to examine real-world issues it generally works best where those issues are ones that are hard to approach directly (so Star Trek, for example, was able to raise questions about sex and racial equality by locating it in space, in the 23rd century, while back in the 1960s it was still a hot potato). Pullman, as I’ve observed before, has a massive chip on his shoulder about organised religion and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. His Dark Materials presents the Catholic Church (one of whose less well known historic titles is “the Magisterium”) as a medieval inquisition clothed in Nazi chic. It’s about as subtle as a brick.

04-11-2019, 10:17	#21
Chris Trollsplatter Cable Forum Team Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: North of Watford Services: Humane elimination of all common Internet pests Posts: 36,918	Re: His Dark Materials It was well produced, and my youngest loved it (she’s a big fan of the Potter films so it’s right up her street). I enjoyed it as a piece of event TV. It’s good to see the BBC acknowledging that the golden age of TV we are now in is in large part driven by the fantasy genre, which our public service broadcasters pay far too little attention to. However, I still don’t really like Pullman as a writer in this genre. Where fantasy is used as a lens to examine real-world issues it generally works best where those issues are ones that are hard to approach directly (so Star Trek, for example, was able to raise questions about sex and racial equality by locating it in space, in the 23rd century, while back in the 1960s it was still a hot potato). Pullman, as I’ve observed before, has a massive chip on his shoulder about organised religion and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. His Dark Materials presents the Catholic Church (one of whose less well known historic titles is “the Magisterium”) as a medieval inquisition clothed in Nazi chic. It’s about as subtle as a brick.