Carnival Row

It's an interesting show. (Amazon Prime.) The basic premise is that humans and the fae - represented in two varieties, one with ram's horns, one with wings - coexist in a secondary world setting; some humans have been killing the fae and chasing them out of their lands, which leads them to flee to The Burgue, a human city somewhere, where in many ways it's a basic immigrants vs. natives story. Which does lead me to wonder, why bother making it secondary world fantasy? As someone who routinely makes up non-magical secondary worlds just for the purpose of writing alternate history without the pressure to make everything but the one changed thing the same, I shouldn't be so judgy, but there's a part of me that wonders, "If you want to make a show about prejudice, nativism, classism, deportation, and so on, why not just make it about our world instead of fantastic racism?" But then, the main mystery did rely on magic. (The fae themselves don't seem particularly magical. The ones with wings fly. I'm not sure if they're legit called pixies and the ones with horns are calls pucks, or if those are supposed to be racial slurs.)

The costuming of the wealthier characters is very interesting. At first I didn't like it: it's 1890s but with bustles, and there's one outfit I really hated with an Edwardian shirtwaist and one of those pointed belts with a smoothly-cut Edwardian skirt ... but it's also cut to smoothly fit over the bustle. It was ugly. But as the show went on, I found myself wanting to actually make some of the gowns, particularly Indira Varma's kind of vampy, bold princess-line gowns with 1890s sleeves, very reminiscent of that one Worth teagown. Tamzin Merchant also has some fantastic ones.