Neverwhere (1996 series)
Summary
"Descend into the shadows of London Below...." An urban fantasy television series by Neil Gaiman that first aired in 1996 on BBC Two. The series is set in "London Below", a magical realm coexisting with the more familiar London, referred to as "London Above", and concerns Richard Mayhew, a man contentedly living a dull life who finds himself dragged into "London Below" and embroiled in a violent yet invisible civil war being waged under the streets, on the rooftops, and in the alleyways of London after playing "good Samaritan" to an otherworldly princess in distress named "Door".
Details
- Release Date: 1996
- Country/Language: UK, English
- Genres/Technical: Fantasy, Drama
- Runtime: 3 hr
- Starring: Gary Bakewell, Laura Fraser, Hywel Bennett
- Ceators: Neil Gaiman and Lenny Henry
- Producer/Production Co: British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Crucial Films
- View Trailer: (link), (link)
- TVTropes: (link)
- IMDB Page: (link)
Ratings
MPAA Ratings
- Rated: (not rated) (perhaps equivalent to a TV-PG for mild TV-friendly Violence, Profanity, and Adult Content)
Tentacle Ratings
A rough measure of how "Lovecraftian" the work is:
- S____ (One Tentacle: Debateably Lovecraftian; has almost no direct connection to Lovecraft's work)
Not explicitly "Lovecraftian", but creator Neil Gaiman has done "Lovecraftian" fiction before and there are similarities between "London Below" and the Dunsany/Lovecraft "Dreamlands".
Note: This rating is not intended as a measure of quality, merely of how closely related to Lovecraftian "Weird" fiction the work is.
Reviews
Review Links:
- Author_andor_Location, ([URL link]) - RATING
- (review needed)
Synopsis
Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)
An urban fantasy television series by Neil Gaiman that first aired in 1996 on BBC Two. The series is set in "London Below", a magical realm coexisting with the more familiar London, referred to as "London Above", and concerns Richard Mayhew, a man contentedly living a dull life who finds himself dragged into "London Below" and embroiled in a violent yet invisible civil war being waged under the streets, on the rooftops, and in the alleyways of London after playing "good Samaritan" to an otherworldly princess in distress named "Door".
Notes
Comments, Trivia, Dedication
Associated Mythos Elements
- TO DO
- fiction: Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere
- fiction: compare to Gene Wolf's Free Live Free
- setting: Dreamlands
- location: "London Below"
Keeper Notes
- From the YSDC forums:
- I recently read Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere for the first time, and the idea of someone sitting on the cathedral rooftop, unseen, playing an eerie, ominous tune on a violin reminded me of it... in Gaiman's urban fantasy novel, the rooftops, alleys, sewers and other lonely places of London (and presumably the world) are populated by a secret world of people who have somehow been forgotten by reality, with the forgotten places of the city acting as a sort of fairy world unseen by the ordinary people of "London Above".
- Borrowing that conceit, any number of strange people might be encountered in the "spaces between" the spaces ordinary city people know, especially if the investigator's sanity has been slipping... your eccentric violinist, a strange man in rags peering through a telescope, a woman in an oddly dated costume marking days off a calendar until "the stars are right" and a door opens from the rooftop to the Dreamlands, a somnambulist, a starvation artist hermit somehow surviving only on rainwater and suffering, a man in a tattered but expensive outfit hungrily eating raw pigeons, or someone who is clearly not completely human anymore but who is more lonely and bored than hostile and who politely invites the investigators to tea inside his make-shift rooftop study constructed in an angle of architecture that shouldn't be there...
- If the investigators speak with these characters, the conversation might be oddly mundane, or it might be lunatic raving, or it might reveal fevered and mind-blasting secrets of the outer spheres with risks to the investigator's sanity and insight into the Mythos. Such characters might be ordinary people or eccentrics with a halfway logical explanation to be there doing what they seem to be doing (spend any amount of time in an out-of-the-way place in the "real world", and you're going to run into them eventually, and you would be such a character yourself), or they might be cultists, or former investigators who've reached their limit and dropped out of the game, or lost innocent victims of The Mythos, or ghosts or supernatural creatures, or avatars of one unpronounceable supernatural being or another, delusions from a fevered investigator's imagination - but why give them a rational explanation at all?
- Like Doctor Pretorius sitting alone having a picnic in the crypt that The Monster happens to stumble into in The Bride of Frankenstein, or the dwarves from Time Bandits, or the man on fire who briefly runs through a scene in the original Phantom of the Opera novel, they're strange characters doing strange things in places they should not be, and hint at deeper dimensions of unreality to the world beyond those that the investigators are directly involved in. On a practical side, they could provide hooks for future adventures or become recurring NPC allies, but they're even more useful for just leaving investigators with a sense of bigger things going on behind the scenes, and a sense that their definition of reality is going to require a bit of change.
