From creators Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar of the show Dark, which starred Louis Hofmann and Oliver Masucci, comes the new Netflix show 1899. The series is an immigrant drama reminiscent of steampunk meets occult aesthetic and seems to revolve as much around complex and disturbing psychological phenomena as dark magic.
In the real world, the turn of the century saw the old Victorian world collide Earth-shatteringly with the technological and social innovations ushered in by the industrial revolution. Storytellers have long drawn inspiration from this confusing, visceral, and mystical time. It was a moment when unlikely, unknown, strange, and powerful men and women seized new materials and scientific discoveries that were little understood and almost otherworldly.
These people came into untouchable power lasting, for many families, to this very day, ultimately delivering, no matter the cost and often no matter the means, unprecedented change than ran down to the molecular level of everyday life. The violence with which these events transpired forged a wholly ideologically new nation that would redefine, for better or worse, the entire world order: the United States. It was cut-throat, dog-eat-dog, as miraculous as it was merciless, and unimaginably so even compared to today.
The trailer for 1899 is literally dark, both visually and contextually, sporting the interpersonal violence, engineering gadgetry, and hint of the supernatural that usually characterizes this era of Western civilization's history, at least in most creative interpretations. The creators have themselves explained that the show has a lot of "action, running, beating [and] screaming."
The show will star Emily Beecham, Aneurin Barnard, Andreas Pietschmann, and Miguel Bernardeau. It is not known what month this year the show will be released. But as we see in the trailer, the events take place in the spooky month of October. We can probably expect this series to drop around Halloween when we are in our pumpkin spiciest, spooky-timiest moods as we head into the winter months.
Here is everything that we spotted in the 1899 trailer and why we are so excited to see what this series is really all about!
What Does the Trailer for 1899 Tell Us About the Series?
Netflix's partially German series centers around a group of diverse travelers aboard the vast ship the Prometheus as they flee from their troubled pasts to make new lives for themselves in America. The trailer depicts characters who are running from violence, self-loathing, money troubles, and criminal activities. A whirling portal in the water toward which the ship is sailing, many dark and stormy nights, dead bodies, kidnappings, flickering lanterns, and lightning bolt-spurting ship engines pervade the trailer footage.
The trailer opens with a woman identifying as Maura Franklin, as she reassures herself in the mirror of who she is and the current date, October 1899. She looks at a newspaper with a headline reading that the Prometheus has been missing for four months, indicating that the show plays with time.
The rest of the trailer shows a group of characters literally running from their past traumas and sins, all converging aboard the treacherous Prometheus. Prometheus, the name, of course, comes from the god in Greek mythology who stole fire from the other gods and gave it to humanity. The name has since resembled the good and evil inherent in humanly, or essentially, the gritty humanness that none of us can escape from.
The passengers are clearly sailing into a nightmare of psychological, magical, and meteorological making. It's a classic institutionalized plot: a group of people from different backgrounds who must work together to escape a seemingly insurmountable fate originating within, without, or both.
Why Are We Excited About This Series?
In the age of Disney's Stagecraft, the mind-boggling new ways in which content is produced have had a significant impact on 1899's development. The show was produced with groundbreaking new film production technology on a virtual production facility built in Germany's Babelsberg Studios. It is the only stage of its kind and, according to the show's creators, is responsible for making this enormous, visually captivating series possible. It will be fascinating to see what this show looks like after being produced in this production environment.
1899 promises character drama, supernatural threats, and the classically wondrous steampunk-style intrigue that so many millennials love. The creators said in a statement:
"What really made us connect to this idea was the concept of having a truly European show with a mixed cast from different countries,” Friese and Baran bo Odar said in a statement. “At its heart is the question of what unites us and what divides us — and how fear can be a trigger for the latter.”
We can't wait to see this intriguing and promising series drop on Netflix this year and hope that it becomes something we can look forward to for several seasons to come!