'Britannia' Review: Blood-Soaked Drama, but Is It Bingeable?

Violence it has. Also, domestic drama. Dynastic intrigue. A soupçon of the supernatural. Set in A.D. 43, during the second Roman invasion of the British Isles-to-be, the nine-part “Britannia” also displays what might be an unfortunate side effect of the rise of bingeable drama—the seeming nonchalance with which writers are approaching a storyline. Creator Jez Butterworth and company drop the viewer into first-century Britain the way an American driver might be dropped onto the wrong side of London’s Hatton Cross Roundabout in a ’57

Morris Minor

equipped with manual transmission. They presume we’ll keep watching, which is something of a presumption given there’s so little information provided, other than a couple of introductory titles about

Julius Caesar’s

armies having been scared off by the Druids in 55 B.C., and the Roman Empire waiting 90 years to try again.

What we can infer is that episode 1 opens on the summer solstice—a druidical high holy day—and the occasion of a kind of Celtic bat mitzvah for the adolescent Cait (

Eleanor Worthington-Cox

), whose whitewashed face is bright with anticipation for the ceremony awaiting her. She’s comforted by her soon-to-be-eviscerated older sister; the two chat cheerfully, as if they’d just checked out “pagan rituals” on Pinterest. Shortly thereafter, the Romans arrive and the business of pillage, maiming and murder commences.

The competition to create the next viewer obsession on streamable TV is fierce, and so is “Britannia”: The violence isn’t on a level previously unseen, exactly, and it certainly seems commensurate with the barbaric age at hand. But the authenticity that the show aspires to in, say, its physical portrayal of certain people—the chief Druid, Veran (

Mackenzie Crook

), looks like a corpse on a juice fast—contrasts oddly with the dialogue and, certainly, the motley collection of accents. (The Romans don’t sound Italian, but a couple of the locals do.) Was biting sarcasm a thing back in A.D. 43? Would a Druid-era adolescent have said, “I hate you sooo much!”? Did Druids really wear tiny rings at the tips of their gnarly pierced fingers? Could be a fashion trend. But you can’t take this stuff too seriously. No one else, evidently, did either.

One would probably have to get deeper into the Britannical weeds than I did to fully appreciate the ornate quality of the plotline, but several of the characters and performers make their presence felt early on—most entertainingly,

Nikolaj Lie Kaas,

whose wandering outcast, Divis, has been deemed too crazy even for the Druids. He makes an uneasy but often comic alliance with Cait, who would like to rescue her father from the clutches of the brutal Romans.

Kelly Reilly,

who might have been inspired by Disney’s “Brave,” is the lethal, flame-haired archer Kara of the Regni, who must have the best dentist in the ancient world and is a force to be reckoned with. Likewise,

David Morrissey

as the distinctly unlikable General Aulus, who has a tough job, namely making war on an island that’s already “at war with itself”: The principal tribes, led by two regal antagonists, Pellenor (

Ian McDiarmid

) and Antedia (a ferociously profane

Zoë Wanamaker

), harbor enough grudges against each other to provide for several seasons’ worth of payback. And that’s without even worrying about the Romans, who look plenty worried.

—Mr. Anderson is a critic in New York. Dorothy Rabinowitz is on vacation.