All involved are dedicated to the cause of making Vikings one of television’s most striking series. It’s also emerged as one of the best, evolving from a guilty pleasure at first to a first-rate tale of substance and even subtlety mixed with the cold steel of primal warfare.
Hirst transports us to a fascinating and brutal world, combining fact with fast-paced fiction into a show, the likes of which come around all too infrequently. As Ragnar does, so too does Season Three of Vikings expand its worldview beyond the inlet at Kattegat and into Medieval Europe, promising battles, glory, and adventures not to be missed.
Here is a series for an American audience that grants us the intelligence to be able to read subtitles, which are deployed to help convey the tart flavor of the various tongues spoken in the show. Combine this with the show’s frequently lovely visuals, and Vikings remains the kind of burly soap opera that appeals to an ever-wider audience.
This is a show that knows exactly what viewers expect of it, and over the course of its three seasons, the saga of reticent raider Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) has shown increasing assuredness and has unpretentiously and reliably supplied exciting and bloody adventures.
While this is essentially the popcorn version of a quality serialized drama--with more overt appeal to men than most--Vikings--is the sort of nifty endeavor that can give the idea of shamelessly marauding in search of loot a good name.
Vikings has benefited all along from the accomplished, subdued performances of a number of its cast, including Mr. Byrne, Mr. Roache, Clive Standen as Ragnar’s warlike brother and both Nathan O’Toole and Alexander Ludwig, who play Ragnar’s son Bjorn at different ages. But the heart of the show remains Mr. Fimmel’s smirking, withdrawn, not quite good but certainly distinctive performance as Ragnar.