The event series, from Canadian production company Muse Entertainment ( The Kennedys), chronicles Tut’s rise to power and his struggle to lead Egypt to glory, while his closest advisers, friends and lovers scheme for their own nefarious interests. Von Ancken has Tut take a long look at his own burial mask, familiar to us from the cover of the catalog for “Treasures of Tutankhamun.” If he could have looked ahead three millenniums and seen “Tut,” he might have wished his tomb had stayed undiscovered a little longer.Tut, which will premiere in 2015 supported by a full-bore marketing campaign, also marks the first time King Tut’s story has been told on television. You probably know how the story ends, but in case you’ve forgotten, Mr. He mostly underplays the vizier, however, keeping his dignity intact (despite some embarrassing eye makeup) but not doing anything to raise the show’s pulse. The person who could have really pushed things over the top was Mr.
Siddig appears to have sensed what the show needed, bringing a little bug-eyed creepiness to his portrayal of the treacherous priest.
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Bunbury appeared together on the ABC Family series “Twisted,” and their performances here aren’t much different than they were as suburban American teenagers. Soon it will burst forth like a flood.” Mr. The cast members seem infected by the overall banality, opting for grim earnestness as they mouth lines like “We all walk the shadow between light and dark,” “I will be forgotten in sand and time” and this wonderfully mixed metaphor, in reference to an epidemic: “This sickness grows like a dam within those walls. Bunbury’s bodies, rubbing up against the boundaries of basic-cable nudity and depicting some surprisingly gymnastic sex. Von Ancken stages the action scenes clumsily and cursorily but, perhaps reflecting Spike’s traditionally male demographic, pays close attention to Ms. Some of this is filmed on Moroccan locations and some on sets - vast expanses of sheetrock and computer animation - that resemble the kind of big, new, mostly empty resorts found in the lesser tropical tourist destinations. This is the first step to his asserting himself as an enlightened warrior-king and also the device by which he encounters Suhad (Kylie Bunbury), the gorgeous farmer’s daughter (not in the historical record) who, through several astounding coincidences, becomes his consort.
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Like many a movie monarch before him, he disguises himself and walks among his people to get a better sense of what’s going on. Despite the advantage of a setting and story largely untouched by television, the show falls back on stock situations and characters of court intrigue - the embattled monarch, the duplicitous adviser, the loyal bodyguard, the murderous queen - you might find in England, Italy, China or Westeros.Īfter an opening scene in which the young Tut stands up to his despotic father, Akhenaten, the story jumps to the show’s present, in which Tut (Avan Jogia) is a teenage pharaoh under the thumb of his vizier (Ben Kingsley), his general (Nonso Anozie), his high priest (Alexander Siddig) and his sister-wife (Sibylla Deen). Like a lot of period dramas, it settles for being slightly silly and mostly dull. Unfortunately, “Tut,” under the direction of the television veteran David Von Ancken, doesn’t reach camp-classic status. There’s a pharaoh’s girlfriend in a coma. There are the extravagantly wigged and bearded king and prince of the Mitanni, Egypt’s enemies, Rick James and Rick James Jr. There are the ancient-Egyptian dancing girls who liven up royal weddings and executions with routines reminiscent of the Knicks City Dancers.
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The full six-hour package (beginning on Sunday night) has its wacky moments. If you’re going to take that route, you might as well go all the way, and teasers for “Tut” made it look as if it might be a campy, over-the-top spectacle, bad enough to be good fun. (His wife also happens to be his half-sister, but that’s historically accurate.) So the makers of “ Tut,” a new mini-series on the Spike cable channel, give us their own Tutankhamen: an action hero who fires arrows from his chariot like an Egyptian Robin Hood and leads a commando raid on his enemies’ palace a stud who has sex in the desert with a beautiful peasant and then brings her back to Thebes and gets her pregnant, causing problems with his wife. That Tut would probably be a hard sell at a pitch meeting. Tutankhamen, according to the best guesses of archaeologists, historians and forensic scientists, was a sickly, inbred monarch with a club foot who died of natural causes as a teenager and was physically incapable of standing up straight, let alone going into battle.
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