Word: roared
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Tempted, almost certainly, by the brakeless popularity of the syndicated series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, Fox this week launches Roar (Mondays, 9 p.m. ET), a show about a reluctant prince named Conor (Heath Ledger) who in 400 A.D. fought to save the last remaining Celtic land (what would become Ireland) from the nasty, enslaving Romans. Never mind that the Roman occupation of Britain was already crumbling by then and that it never extended to Ireland in the first place. Historical exactitude isn't something to be expected from a series with a prince who looks like...
...Roar's creator, '70s teen idol turned television auteur Shaun Cassidy, admits that he let his "imagination soar" with the series. What inspired him to set an epic in this period was his reading of Thomas Cahill's 1996 best seller, How the Irish Saved Civilization, a book about Celtic monks who transcribed important Latin texts for posterity. (However, in the first few episodes, at least, no scholar-monks appear...
Like Cassidy's first series, the eerie and generally well-crafted thriller American Gothic (1995), Roar is a larger-than-life, good-vs.-evil tale unleavened by campy humor, the ingredient this television genre seems to require. Perhaps because Cassidy spent so many years himself as an object of kitsch, he demands that his television ventures be taken quite seriously. What he is aiming for here (despite the physical appearance of his stars) is lyricism. You see his effort in the lingering shots of seaside cliffs, the neverending play of ethereal Celtic music meant to suggest a world of characters...
...those good intentions can be tedious, of course. Roar moves along at a distractingly languorous pace and makes you wish for the zinginess of Hercules and Xena, shows meant to be nothing more than absurd fun. Like those series, Roar has plenty of high kicks and sword fights, but its scenes feel like bad attempts at re-creating Braveheart rather than very entertaining ancient-world episodes of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It is unlikely too that Hercules, played by the Fabio-coiffed Kevin Sorbo as a guy who appears to have lost his way back from spring break, would...
...camera rushes from one to the other, then to both, and finally, plainly, gives up and lets us listen. And the eyes of the jazz musicians alone hold another entire movie with-in the movie. The music functions as a kind of running commentary on the movie: horns roar and seem to laugh cynically as one event unfolds and then another. At one point Mrs. Stilton, napping with Blondie in the house of a friend from work, wakes up at the sound of jazz music careering along across town...