Like many a movie monarch before him, he disguises himself and walks among his people to get a better sense of what’s going on. Despite the advantage of a setting and story largely untouched by television, the show falls back on stock situations and characters of court intrigue - the embattled monarch, the duplicitous adviser, the loyal bodyguard, the murderous queen - you might find in England, Italy, China or Westeros.Īfter an opening scene in which the young Tut stands up to his despotic father, Akhenaten, the story jumps to the show’s present, in which Tut (Avan Jogia) is a teenage pharaoh under the thumb of his vizier (Ben Kingsley), his general (Nonso Anozie), his high priest (Alexander Siddig) and his sister-wife (Sibylla Deen). Like a lot of period dramas, it settles for being slightly silly and mostly dull. Unfortunately, “Tut,” under the direction of the television veteran David Von Ancken, doesn’t reach camp-classic status. There’s a pharaoh’s girlfriend in a coma. There are the extravagantly wigged and bearded king and prince of the Mitanni, Egypt’s enemies, Rick James and Rick James Jr. There are the ancient-Egyptian dancing girls who liven up royal weddings and executions with routines reminiscent of the Knicks City Dancers. The full six-hour package (beginning on Sunday night) has its wacky moments. If you’re going to take that route, you might as well go all the way, and teasers for “Tut” made it look as if it might be a campy, over-the-top spectacle, bad enough to be good fun. (His wife also happens to be his half-sister, but that’s historically accurate.) So the makers of “ Tut,” a new mini-series on the Spike cable channel, give us their own Tutankhamen: an action hero who fires arrows from his chariot like an Egyptian Robin Hood and leads a commando raid on his enemies’ palace a stud who has sex in the desert with a beautiful peasant and then brings her back to Thebes and gets her pregnant, causing problems with his wife. That Tut would probably be a hard sell at a pitch meeting. Tutankhamen, according to the best guesses of archaeologists, historians and forensic scientists, was a sickly, inbred monarch with a club foot who died of natural causes as a teenager and was physically incapable of standing up straight, let alone going into battle.
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