I’m sure there are movies that have a greater disparity between the critics’ score and the audience score, but I haven’t heard of one. Netflix’ Marco Polo, a 10-part drama about the explorer’s first years in Mongolia as a “guest” of the great Kublai Khan, scores a mere 27% among critics, based on 26 reviews, and a whopping 93% average from nearly 400 viewers.
We binged our way through the 10 hours this past weekend and we really enjoyed it—my wife liked it even more than I did, and she’s a very hard sell when it comes to television. Though Polo is the title character, the show is really more about Khan, who wants to be emperor of the world. He’s not a bad man, though, for the most part. The name summons thoughts of Attila the Hun (at least in my mind), but he was a very open, accepting and thoughtful leader. He rarely acted on impulse, but thought through all of the consequences of his actions. He accepted all religions, his court was filled with foreigners whose opinions he valued, and he invited scrutiny of his decisions, both before they were implemented and after. He gave his most trusted men the opportunity to say “I told you so” when things went wrong. How accurate is this to reality? Who knows what a man who lived over 700 years ago was like, but Marco Polo liked him and his court enough to stick around for nearly two decades.
Polo himself is mostly a viewpoint character. True, his life is put on the line a few times, and he isn’t exactly a passive participant in things, but Khan is in the driver’s seat and everything revolves around him. There are spies and intrigue, the obligatory blind kung-fu master (and praying mantises rather than grasshoppers), plenty of naked women, some great sword fights and an assault on a walled city reminiscent of Lord of the Rings. No expense was spared in this production and I have no idea why the critics hated it so. One thought it was so tedious that it was binge-proof, but that wasn’t our experience at all. B.D. Wong was especially good as Khan, with Joan Chen as his empress-wife. The villain is the Chancellor of the Song dynasty, a man who has risen from poverty to a position of great power whose status is threatened when the emperor dies, leaving behind only a 5-year-old heir. From a historical perspective, we found it fascinating, because this is a part of history that we knew little about. At one point, Khan was the ruler of 1/5 of the populated world in the late 13th century.
Despite critical panning, the show has been renewed for a second season. Yay!
If The Affair hadn’t been renewed for a second season, I would be seriously pissed right now. What were they thinking? Were they so confident in the show that they knew it would be picked up? I can’t think of any other reason why they’d end the tenth hour the way they did. Holy moly.
One of the show’s most intriguing aspects, beyond awesome performances by the four leads, is the he said/she said disparity. Some of it is trivial, but some things are blazingly different. The biggest so far is the difference between Noah’s memory of what happened at the end of the trip to pick up their daughter and Allison’s version of that story. Totally, totally different. The characters were dressed differently and just about everything that happened was different. Both dramatic, but not even in the same ballpark. Fascinating, for sure. It’s going to be a long wait until next season.
