Reproduced from the Montreal Gazette without permission.
TV With Derring-do: Sharpe Thrusts Sex Appeal Into History TV
You don't get a whole lot of swashbuckling in prime time. The TV screen is too small. To foil villainy and sweep fair damsels off their feet, a strong, handsome action hero needs more elbow room than is available in the claustrophobic kingdom of the close-up and two-shot.
Confrontations between good and evil on TV take place in police interrogration rooms, where the only way to distinguish between cops and robbers is by remembering that bad guys dress better.
Prime-time's damsels are never in distress, save for Ally McBeal's weekly existential crisis. The only sweeping done by house-husbands and curlers.
In a derring-don't TV environment where swashes have been left unbuckled since Robin Hood, Richard Sharpe is a throwback. He's strong, brave, good-looking and equally adept riding horses or ripping bodices.
He is, of course, a fictional character whose adventures occur in the early days of the 19th century. Napoleon is master of most of Europe, but the British, under Wellington, have secured a beachhead on the Spanish peninsula.
In a series of best-selling novels, Bernard Cornwell created Richard Sharpe as a maverick officer in Wellington's army. Promoted from the ranks (after saving Wellington's life during a skirmish with French cavalry scouts), the newly minted Major Sharpe is scorned as a parvenu by commissoned aristos, and loathed as a class traitor by the rag-tag losers under his command.
It's the eternal dilemma of middle managers. But Sharpe's abililty to cope suggests that the modern under-assistant director of human resources might be happier if a sword came with the job.
Sharpe doesn't spend a lot of time agonizing about whether his colleagues like him or not. He's too busy killing people and making time with a succession of comely senoritas.
Cornwell's stories were adapted for television and have yielded 14 self-contained MoWs [movies of the week], some of which have turned up on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre. Beginning tonight, History TV will feature Sharpe in the specialty channel's new Adventure Sundays series.
With its swordfights, cannon volleys, cavalry charges and eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations on the eternal theme of "whose is bigger?", Sharpe is splendid entertainment for adolescent boys of all ages. Women may, however, derive a certain degree of sub-cerebral stimulation by feasting their eyes on Sean Bean.
The series star is a five-alarm hunk whose good looks (he's a cross between Patrick Swayze and a young Robert Redford) may prompt susceptible viewers (ie those for whom it's been a long time between swashbucklings) to conclude that Major Sharpe can tamp their muskets any time.
Dishy guy, period costumes, battalions of extras, horses, panoramaic outdoor settings - what's not to like? The kind of eye-pleasing escapism that filled Bijoux balconies when Errol Flynn scaled the main rigging still works, even though the magic has been reduced to 19 diagonal inches.
by Mike Boone, The Montreal Gazette, Sunday, August 2nd, 1998.