'The Last Kingdom': Mud, Blood, and Good Fun

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If you’re willing to sample one more mud-caked slog through ancient Anglo-Saxon history with attractive actors getting down and dirty, The Last Kingdom will prove worth the effort. This new BBC America series, premiering on Saturday, is a highly entertaining trot through ninth-century pre-England, when men were men, women were mostly wenches, and scores were settled by putting someone’s eye out.

Last Kingdom is based on Bernard Cornwell’s best-selling historical novels, and stars Alexander Dreymon as Uhtred of Bebbanburg, son of a Saxon nobleman who was kidnapped as a youth and raised among the Norsemen Danes. A one-man Shakespeare play, Uhtred carries within him both sides of an ongoing battle as well as an ardent love for a girl who grew up in his village, Brida (Emily Cox).

Writer-producer Chrissy Skinns and director Nick Murphy delineate the warring clans vividly, with the Danish Viking Earl Ragnar (Tobias Santelmann) defeating the Saxons and killing Uhtred’s father early on, setting the stage for more plotting and bloodshed. The devious people on both sides don’t just put a figurative knife in your back to achieve their goals — they’ll put a literal axe in your back to do so.

As TV, Last Kingdom falls somewhere between the soapy spice of History’s Vikings and the plodding moroseness of FX’s Bastard Executioner. It’s no Game of Thrones, but then, Thrones has the advantage of fantasy worlds augmenting its quasi-Anglo-Saxon mythos. That said, Last Kingdom is imaginative and amusing, and Uhtred makes for a smart, tough, randy central character, one prone to telling a woman, “We should hump tonight… Our destiny is to hump!” As pick-up lines go, it works awfully well in the year 866.

The Last Kingdom airs Saturdays at 10 p.m. on BBC America.