Jamestown (Sky1)

This is one I intend to watch. It looks interesting, with quite a few familiar names in the cast - Max Beesley, Jason Flemyng, Burn Gorman, Dean Lennox Kelly.

As the production company is Carnival Films - responsible for Downton Abbey and The Last Kingdom - I'm expecting it to be lavishly filmed and full of period detail.

I watched this last night.

I thought it was very good indeed - some scene setting to begin with and then the plotting began - all in the name of trying find a level of freedom that the settlers did not have back in Blighty.

Each of the three women (who were "bought" by their husbands-to-be which paid for their passage over and only one of the three women actually knew who she was to marry) it centres around are very different in character, but seem happy enough to look out for each other. The men folk on the other hand all seem to have their own agendas.

I'm looking forward to the rest of this and have set it to series record.

Lots of scene setting but it was okay. Will watch next week to see and then decide.

Go the feeling the script and storyline is so obvious redubbing wouldn't help it. The acting is not up to much either, wigs are dodgy and I'm not sure if I can do another episode. Scenery is nice though. Mud looks authentic. Sadly not any characters I actually like as yet.

Woman from the pub is beyond stupid considering the only reason she wasn't hung as a thief is because she agreed to get married to someone in Jamestown. Her story line so far goes way beyond independent and rebellious and almost casts her as reckless and more stupid than a woman in her position was ever likely to be.

Nobody considered setting up a search party to go look for burnt brother or burnt carcass to bring it home and yet up to that point nobody has said it was too dangerous to try. If the brothers could trade up river, why nobody else.

Posh bird is way too obvious and not cunning enough, she's hardly Milady is she.

Governors wife has no role at all and yet she would be a lynch pin for the women in the colony and probably bring them together much more. She needs to be more worldly wise and a bit like granny in Downton otherwise there is no central focus.

The men are all brutal or dandies and nothing much in between.

Chronic so far but perhaps one more episode because the critics are liking it

The characters are all too full on. There's no light and shade. The Posh One would be a lot more circumspect and a lot less obvious. The pub owner's wife, would be well aware of the dangers around cursing people. She has been in prison and she was saved from the noose. They barely have a conversation about how things are for them as a couple. The other woman is too senseless, she has after all undertaken to travel across treacherous seas to marry a man she has never met and in reality is more likely to have agreed to marry the blacksmith ( a man with a trade and a skill) than the slightly feckless brother of the first man. To have undertaken this decision and journey must have made her a very stoic and sensible woman or desperate to get away, and she is neither so far.

Mainly it's the script and the cartoon baddies etc. I think it has gone down well in other places perhaps the script is better in French!!

I have the last two to catch up with. This could happen this afternoon.

Looks like the slaves will be a big part of series 2. How long did it take the blacksmith to make all those chains and manacles - and where did he get all the iron from?

I kept on with the series, and intend to watch series 2, but I continued to think some of the characters were not well drawn. The women were OK, as you might expect since the story was centred on the wives' arrival - though Mercy looked like a reboot of Minnie from Lark Rise to Candleford - and so were the Sharrow brothers, the blacksmith & the publican. But I found the doctor and the reverend pretty wishy-washy, and it took me most of the series to distinguish between the leaders and their duties. The discontented town marshal and Jason Flemyng as the governor I eventually got, but I never really understood what the roles of Jocelyn's fiancee and the scheming Burn Gorman character were. Massinger was too extreme a villain for me, and I doubted whether he would have the need to attack the relatively small Sharrow operation so viciously.