'Penny Dreadful' Is More Wonderful Than Ever

The beautiful pulp fiction that is Penny Dreadful returns for a third season on Showtime Sunday night. It comes back with a broader canvas (the American West as well as London, Zanzibar, and other exotic locales), an expanded cast (Wes Studi makes a terrific entrance as a Native American who’s been tracking one of the show’s main characters), and more figures from Gothic literature (I thought I was sick of vampires until I saw the way Dreadful introduces Dracula).

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For all this, the series remains centered on the fantastic Eva Green’s Vanessa Ives, who starts season three a quivering nervous wreck who can’t bear to face a sunny day. In the premiere — already available on YouTube, Facebook, and OnDemand — Vanessa drags herself into the gloom of a London mourning the death of Britain’s last great public poet Alfred Lord Tennyson to visit someone who might help her in her severe melancholy. She’s a radical therapist played by Patty LuPone. Yes, the same LuPone who played the Cut-Wife witch last season. Her new character, Florence Seward, is a distant relative of her previous one, but LuPone quickly establishes Seward as her own unique personality, brilliantly deductive in her quick analysis of any patient, including Vanessa.

Penny Dreadful crosses continents this season, and plops down most satisfyingly in New Mexico, where Josh Hartnett’s Ethan has been extradited to stand trial. The premiere features a rootin’-tootin’ shoot-’em-up scene that frees Ethan from one set of captors only to find himself in the clutches of another, more familiar set.

I freely admit that, last season, Penny Dreadful got lost in my own personal Too Much TV dilemma — I’d forget to watch the latter episodes of the second season, not because my interest had waned (well, it had a little), but more because there was just too much TV to watch. I won’t be making that mistake with the new season. By the end of the first episode, Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) has met Dr. Jekyl (Shazad Latif), and Timothy Dalton’s Sir Malcolm has had one tough fist fight in East Africa. I’m not a fan of most pop culture that attempts to mix and mash up characters from earlier-century fiction to form what amounts to old-fashioned superhero team-ups: Too often, the result is strained or campy. But Dreadful creator John Logan has firm control over the series’ mordantly witty, dry tone. He has me hooked again.

Penny Dreadful airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Showtime.