The Lowdown

Revenge is an American TV series which transposes the basic setup of The Count of Monte Cristo to the present day. It follows Amanda Clarke, who returns to fashionable high society in the Hamptons (Long Island, New York) under the guise of the wealthy socialite Emily Thorne in order to take revenge on the people who ruined her life.

Some Observations

• The setup is based on the original story: years before the events of the show, the main character's father was betrayed and framed for a crime he didn't commit, leading him to be imprisoned and subsequently murdered. Amanda then spends time in prison herself, but is released (rather than escapes) and inherits a huge fortune through an eccentric dotcom billionaire who is loyal to her father, and also serves as her conscience-cum-partner-in-crime.
• Aside from that, there isn't a great deal of read across in terms of plot and character. Amanda's plan for revenge involves seducing the son and heir of the betrayer family and using this to ruin them. Beyond that, there are a lot of extraneous characters who are added to give it a soap opera-like feel and aren't directly related to the main plot. Almost all the characters are very scheming and have their own subplot where they are playing an angle of some kind (cheating husband, social-climbing assistant, gold-digging room mate, and so on)
• The 19th Century Parisian society portrayed in the novel translates very well to the present-day wealthy US elite of the TV show. Everyone is delightfully acidic and masks their power behind a veneer of politeness.
• The first series is 24 episodes long, so they have to make up a fair amount for her to do so that she is taking regular revenge on people before she takes revenge on the main culprits. At times this seems a little stretched, and you feel like the writers had a great idea but are struggling to follow through with it ("And then there was this other guy, who wouldn't bring her father a magazine in prison when he really wanted one. He's going down this week.")

The Verdict

The first season of Revenge is excellent, but it really loses its way after that. Despite a few problems, they manage to keep all the balls in the air until the end of the initial run, but it falls flat when they have to keep going beyond that and you see that they are just making it up as they go along. Without giving too much away, it feels like they had planned for a big payoff and the end of the season, but then the show was much more successful than they had anticipated and they had to make fundamental changes to make sure they could do a second season. As a result, they just make up a whole load of rubbish that doesn't work at all, and most of the characters change direction inexplicably. Transposing The Count of Monte Cristo to the Hamptons was a really strong idea, but would have been better as a mini-series.

Characters and Plot Elements