I
was thinking about New Amsterdam this morning. You know, the 17th-century Dutch
settlement founded on what is now Manhattan Island. It was the capital of the New Netherland
colony, which was eventually conquered by the British and renamed New York
after some duke or another. Anyway, I was thinking I should reread the book The Island at the
Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony
That Shaped America, by Russell Shorto.
It is a non-fiction book that reads like historical fiction. Shorto does an excellent
job using journals, letters, and other historical documents to tease out the story of the settlement. The characters really come to life and
you can picture what it was really like there. I could write a
few-thousand words on the book and colony but that's not the purpose of this
particular blog post. I'll highly recommend it to any history buff and leave it
there for now.
So I was pondering New Amsterdam and googled it to find one of the old and very cool maps Shorto mentions in his book. I was surprised to see there was a short-lived TV show back in 2008 also named New Amsterdam. I don't even remember hearing about it but was intrigued. Work could wait for a quick trip into Wikipedia.
New Amsterdam starred
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Jaime Lannister from The Game of Thrones, as John Amsterdam,
an NYPD homicide detective. Unlike most police detectives on major network dramas Mr. Amsterdam is over four-hundred years old and has been living in Manhattan
since he was fourteen. The reason for his immortality is fairly contrived -
I'll let Wikipedia explain it:
"He was a Dutch soldier in Manhattan in the year 1642 when he stepped in front of a sword to save the life of a Native American girl during a massacre of her tribe. The girl in turn rescued Amsterdam by weaving a spell that conferred immortality upon him. It was also prophesied that he would not age until he finds his one true love, and only then will he become whole and ready for mortality."
Questions abound.
What's love got to do with it, for one? Also, how does one define "true
love" here? Is there some great arbiter of the heart standing by to
pronounce John's immortality over, or is it a "know it when you see it" kind of thing? Also, if this girl can make some Dutch dude immortal maybe she's got
something in her spell book to help her tribe out against aggressive colonists? I guess that would've gotten in the way of the plot.
Despite this awkward
setup, there were a few promising aspects of the show. It looks like they flashed back to show John at different points throughout history: arriving in the New World,
fighting in numerous wars, and meeting historical figures. He had a whole bunch
of wives, 63 children, and a bunch of dogs, apparently (his most-recent is named Thirty-Six). This creates the possibility of a whole host of descendants to track and stumble into. If done right these things could be really interesting. Judging by the Nielson ratings trajectory, and the
fact there were only eight episodes, I'm guessing it was not.
The premise sounds
fishy and the show quickly plummeted in ratings and right off the air, but was it truly terrible?
Television that touches on history is very interesting to me, but I've come to believe I'm in the minority here. ABC and the other major American networks cater to the lowest
common audience. This usually means anything high concept doesn't get much of a
chance to develop and grow its viewership,or doesn't make it onto the schedule to begin with. That kind of thing really only seems to get a long look on HBO, AMC, and the BBC.
I'm not sure if this
is what happened to New Amsterdam but I
intend to find out. The full run of the show is available for free on Hulu. I
have low expectations, but if the show was good I'll be back to rant about TV networks, crappy programming, and what it says about the American audience another time.
- Nick
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