Among the numerous shows about Draculas, Frankensteins, and other copyright-friendly monsters that have lurched all over the airwaves over the last few years, few have gone as gleefully over the top as Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, the kind of series where Dorian Grey and Victor Frankenstein can end up in a love triangle with each other, while Josh Hartnett The Werewolf tries to stop his girlfriend from getting married to the devil.
The horror series aired its last episodes back in 2016, but now Variety is reporting that it’s coming back, with a new sequel show set in 1938 Los Angeles, 40 years after the events of the original show. Resisting the obvious choice (Penny Dreadfuller, or maybe even Penny Dreadfuller House), creator John Logan has announced that the new series will be titled City Of Angels, and will center on the mythical figure of Santa Muerte, a.k.a. “Our Lady Of Holy Death.”
The original Penny Dreadful managed to ground its goofier extremes by taking its 19th-century London setting relatively seriously; meanwhile, we can’t wait to see the new series introduce a bunch of out-of-work 1930s stereotypes who have also been adapted from public domain novels, delivering hard-boiled dialogue about how they want to sock ol’ Scratch right in the kisser.