![]() FX’s drama has its own secondary plots and characters, mainly related to James Delaney’s efforts to thwart East India by preventing them from seizing a small island, Nootka Sound, he inherited from his father. The Canadian series is just as much the story of Michael Smyth (played by Landon Liboirn), an Irish petty thief who stows away on a Hudson’s Bay ship and then, as punishment, agrees to become a mole within Declan Harp’s organization. Momoa is being touted as the star of this Netflix show, but he’s hardly front and center. With his red-stained face, steely glare, and threats like, “If you send 12 men at me I’ll send back 12 pairs of testicles,” his Harp is clearly no one to cross. Plus, it’s always going to be tough to out-act Tom Hardy, who also co-produced his show with his dad, “Chips” Hardy (and gives himself the lion’s share of the screen-time). Momoa’s character has a tough time competing with that kind of outsized origin story, and it doesn’t help that he shares so much of Frontier’s main plot with a handful of minor protagonists. In Taboo, the East India bigwigs talk nervously of James’ years in Africa, and the rumors that he actually died and was revived through some cannibalistic ritual. Frontier‘s half-Irish/half-Cree strongman lives among Canada’s native population, and has a reputation among the Hudson’s Bay elites for being mad, merciless, and maybe super-powered. Just how badass are Delaney and Harp? Both are spoken about in whispers by their adversaries, who see them as something akin to a force of nature, set loose from above to punish the greedy. ![]() ![]() ![]() The question now becomes: Which of these historical, tough-guy-on-a-vengeance-quest dramas is right for you? We’ve provided a sort of “tale of the tape” for these two series, weighing which one has the advantage when it comes to what they have in common. Both shows are grubby and earthy, with a cast of characters that includes oily upperclass villains and scrappy underworld types. Hardy’s character James Delaney and Momoa’s Declan Harp are both burly, violent men, with eerily similar backstories involving ancient mysticism and colonialist dads who diddled the natives. And yesterday, Netflix dropped the Canadian Discovery Channel’s Frontier, a six-episode series (with a second season already in the works) starring Jason Momoa as another aristocrat’s rogue offspring, sabotaging the Hudson’s Bay Company’s efforts to monopolize the fur trade in 18th century Canada. On January 10th, FX debuted its BBC co-production Taboo, an eight-part miniseries written by Peaky Blinders honcho Steven Knight, starring Tom Hardy as a shipping tycoon’s long-lost son, who stirs up trouble for the East India Company in 1814 London. So perhaps it’s not that odd that FX and Netflix are about to serve up competing historical adventures, both set in and around the worlds of malevolent old European trading companies. For no apparent reason, we’ll get hit with a couple of “giant space rock threatens to destroy the Earth” blockbusters in the same summer or a pair of “behind the scenes at a late-night comedy series” in the same fall TV season. Television and movie producers have a weird habit of doubling-up on big ideas, delivering two projects with more or less the same basic concept at roughly the same time.
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