Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
1998 was a helluva year. Cher believed in life after love, Bruce Willis averted armageddon via drilling, and a presidential scandal and the Winter Olympics dominated the news. Some things change, some things stay the same! On television, viewers in 1998 got a sneak peek at a storytelling style that would quickly disappear, only to reemerge roughly two decades later to major buzz. That format is, of course, the star-studded TV miniseries.
TV movies and miniseries were big deals in the ’90s, whether they were multi-night adaptations of Stephen King epics (Tim Curry as Pennywise, forever in our nightmares) or Disney’s family fairytale of the week (Brandy! Is! Cinderella!). And then Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? happened and TV became obsessed with high-stakes reality and game shows for a decade. But right before those shows debuted at the dawn of the 21st century, NBC started turning out some truly Next Level, star-studded miniseries, the exact kind of stuff you see on cable or streaming services nowadays. Ted Danson in Gulliver’s Travels! Armand Assante and Vanessa Williams in The Odyssey! And, quite possibly the king of them all, 1998’s three-part Merlin, an artifact of late ’90s network TV excess that you simply have to stream on Amazon’s Prime Video ASAP.
Like the Big Little Lies and American Crime Story series of today, Merlin starred a murderer’s row of big screen names (Sam Neill! Miranda Richardson! Isabella Rossellini! Martin Short! Helena Bonham Carter! James Earl Jones!). It also featured cutting-edge special effects (compared to late ’90s TV), serving Dark Age fantasy realness years before Game of Thrones or the Lord of the Rings films.
And then there’s the mini itself, which… lordy. Y’all, Merlin is the very definition of extra.
All of this, the big name stars and attention-grabbing (for a variety of reasons) special effects, combines to create a watch that feels in-between the Peak TV we get nowadays and our hazy memories of what TV was 20 years ago. Seriously, NBC let Jurassic Park’s Dr. Grant sport a Rachel cut while playing legendary “hand wizard” Merlin! And then there’s Miranda Richardson, stomping through the role of the poisonous Queen Mab with all the fierce commitment of a horror queen in a RuPaul’s Drag Race challenge. Richardson is giving you big budget Rita Repulsa glamor while hissing every line like a raspy snake. There are choices being made.
And then there’s Martin Short, who turns it out as Mab’s gnome sidekick Frik. Merlin is a miniseries that lets Martin Short really cut loose, bouncing from look to look with reckless abandon and some melty-face transition effects. His elastic performance just adds to the total camp value of this adventure.
Martin Short cannot be tamed!
But that’s not it. Merlin is not content to coast by on hella committed performances (Neill, Short, and Bonham Carter were nominated for Emmys!). All of the witches and wizards and royalty are delivered to viewers by director Steve Barron in a truly flamboyant manner. Sweeping vistas, landscapes that seem pulled from an Enya video, and special effects trickery that will leave you unsure of what could possibly come next. If Merlin looks like it was directed by someone who crafted the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and the video for A-ha’s “Take On Me,” that’s because it was.
If any of this sounds interesting to you and you’re a Prime member, then know that Merlin is at your beck and call. Yes, it is three hours long and that’s a lot to ask when there’s a lot of new TV out there. But if you want a glimpse at what Peak TV looked like in 1998, there’s no better choice than Merlin.
