I just finished watching the first season of His Dark Materials. I really liked it. It was one of those shows where I binged watched. When I say binge watching, I don’t mean watching all eight shows in one night. My idea of binge watching is watching the entire first season in one week.
If you like a show with talking animals, you will love this show. His Dark Materials is based on trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman. The first volume, Northern Lights, won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in the UK in 1995. In 2005, Pullman received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children’s and youth literature. Swedes regard this prize as second only to the Nobel Prize in Literature; it has a value of approximately CAD$ 725,000.
The series follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parrallel universes. One distinctive aspect of Pullman’s story is the presence of “dæmons” (pronounced “demon”). In the birth-universe of the story’s protagonist Lyra Belacqua, a human individual’s inner-self manifests itself throughout life as an animal-shaped “dæmon”, that almost always stays near its human counterpart. Lyra’s dæmon, Pantalaimon is her dearest companion, who she calls “Pan”.
I have to commend the show’s amazing cast of voice actors. If I were to ever meet animals that talk, they would definitely sound like they do in this series. My favorite voice is that of Pan, Lara’s daemon. His voice is done by by Kit Connor. I wonder how Kit Connor researches his voice role. Does he watch hours of nature documentaries on ermines on PBS? Does he visit the zoo and spend hours with ermines?
I give this series 5 stars out of 5 stars. You can watch it on Crave.
m99 