It is not a matter of advertising. I know that the show exists and still don't watch it. I followed the first season but could not be bothered to watch the second, so I am part of the decline in audience.
The first season was shallow, but did not admit that until it was over. Where a Game Of Thrones had multiple plots which carefully connected (and this show clearly wanted to cash in on the GoT-like epic trend) this show just delivered trope after trope for their own sake. Hardly anything made more sense beyond its own subplot. The characters (with a few exceptions) were rather boring. Instead of giving them some compelling motivation, they just got one special trait in an attempt to make them interesting, so they became the blind warrior, the kick-ass girl, etc. A lot like comic book heroes.
At no point it was clear where the narrative would go, therfore the show lacked tension. Just few episodes managed to create some kind of anticipation by letting the character do something with an outcome which would make the audience either wonder how it would end or how they would achieve a known result. Instead conflicts get resolved by deus ex machina moments, like pulling the plans for a trebuchet out of Polo's own arse.
Marco Polo himself comes across like the typical colonist hero, who singlehandedly developes western war machines and shows the wildlings how it is done. As a character he is absurdly pale and the show does not commit to him being the main character, but neither manages to establish a true ensemble structure. The point of view is unclear. Is this influences by the tales of Marco Polo? Then it lacks the stylistic hints to show the unreliability of the narrator and cheats by showing parts he cannot know. Or is Polo just one of many characters, in which case his story is surprisingly uninteresting and the least compelling part of everything. They wanted all at once, so the result looks as sloppy as expected.
A show which deals with a real topic should be more invested into showing the wonders of that reality. The mongolians were advanced and a scalable method of government. They would have conquered europe as well. Bringing this across would have been so much more interesting than reducing them once more to wild people with strange traditions. The show never decided whether to be real or fantasy. We have the blind warrior, and yet the setting is an attempt to show an authentic part of history like Rome. There is a line between creative license and butchery, and the creators of Marco Polo clearly have no clue where it lies. It is not just about hard facts (Rome was sloppy with those as well), but how the show fails entirely to reflect the spirit of the time it is portraying. This could have been any age and any location, so little does the show care for its background.
So when wondering whether I want to watch the second season, I simply did not feel like watching another row of random events, nudity and torture porn. I would have liked some conflict, which is set up in the first episode and gets solved in the last, with everything between leading to that resolution. The show failed to do that, it was on the writing side sloppy and no matter how much money gets thrown at something that messed up, it won't make it watchable.
Usually I don't mind when content gets offered as long as someone else likes it. In this case however, I'd be happy if they just cancel it and invest the money into a show worth watching.
reply
share