“The wheel weaves as the wheel wills,” and for Amazon Prime Video’s new fantasy series, it wills it quickly. Arcane is a world worth getting lost within. And it deserves to be lauded as the new benchmark for what can be done when it comes to successfully translating worthy videogame universes into a different medium while refusing to dumb down or simplify complex storytelling. It has more mature storytelling and emotional resonance than many live-action shows do right now. The textures, lighting, and color palettes-dank and neon in the under city, which juxtaposes against the more pastel and metallic topside-are a feast for the eyes.Įven if you have no interest in picking up any kind of gaming console, do yourself a favor and give Arcane a try.
If you’re not, it doesn’t matter because a huge part of the appeal of the series is getting lost in how visually immersive every frame of this show is. If you happen to be a gamer, the art deco-meets-steampunk aesthetics of Piltover and Zaun will immediately draw parallels to the lauded Bioshock games. Not unlike other heavy world-building series like Game of Thrones or Shadow and Bone, Arcane mostly concerns itself with political and familial conflicts in a world where magic exists.
It’s the perpetual challenge for even the best creatives: finding the right balance of fan service while engaging non-gamer audiences.
But as so many videogame-to-movie adaptations have proved, even hit games have a rough time translating to a new medium. For 10 years, the duo and their studio have cultivated a passionate and massively dedicated community of eight million players who have immersed themselves in the games, tie-in comics, and music videos that make up the complex mythology of the world. Stunningly crafted in a mix of 2D and 3D by French animation studio Fortiche Productions, Arcane is created and showrun by League video game architects Christian Linke and Alex Yee. Netflix and RiotGame’s Arcane, based on the decade-old League of Legends multiplayer online battle arena game, is a revelation. Honorable Mention: Insecure (HBO), Marvel’s Hit Monkey (Hulu), The Sex Lives of College Girls (HBO Max), Yellowjackets (Showtime), Ghosts (CBS), The Big Leap (FOX)
The voting panel is composed of Paste Editors and TV writers with a pretty broad range of tastes. It can be on a network, basic cable, premium channel, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube or whatever you can stream on your smart TV, as long as a new episode was made available the previous week (ending Sunday) -or, in the case of shows released all at once, it has to have been released within the previous four weeks. The rules for the Power Rankings are simple: Any current series on TV qualifies, whether it’s a comedy, drama, news program, animated series, variety show or sports event. It’s going to take a lot to unseat Succession and, now, The Great. Meanwhile, our Honorable Mentions this week are full, again, of shows we are truly enjoying individually, but which didn’t earn enough of a consensus for a top spot. The Wheel of Time struck a chord with some, while others thought it did not come close to delivering TV’s next great fantasy hit. Many of us were disappointed with Netflix’s messy Cowboy Bebop adaptation, though a few spoke out in its defense. But that wasn’t all-there were a number of big premieres this week that garnered polarized responses from our staff and writers. If any season deserved it, it was this one. Firstly, we had to deal with the devastation wrought by the Great British Baking Show not giving us a four-person final. When the publisher announces that they're travelling to Australia for an authentic ‘Clementine’ Christmas before signing off on the lucrative deal, Emmy must race back to the old family farm, roping in her cousin (David Sheridan) and his husband Miles (Brown) to help maintain the ruse.Emotions were running high during the voting of our Power Ranking this week.
But the truth is, “Clementine” is actually Emmy Jones – a New York socialite who has been passing her late mother’s journals off as her own. Starring Australian-American actress Poppy Montgomery ( Without a Trace), Hugh Sheridan ( Packed to the Rafters), Darren McMullen ( House Husbands) and Nicholas Brown ( Wakefield), the Stan Original Film Christmas on the Farm follows Clementine Jones (Montgomery), an Australian author whose autobiographical book about life on a Queensland farm is snapped up by powerhouse publishers London & London.