Fansided

Ultraviolet, 20 years later, is the greatest vampire story never known

By Brittany Frederick

Ultraviolet stars (from left) Philip Quast, Idris Elba, Susannah Harker and Jack Davenport. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Channel 4.
Ultraviolet stars (from left) Philip Quast, Idris Elba, Susannah Harker and Jack Davenport. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Channel 4. /
facebooktwitterreddit

Ultraviolet took a massive bite out of the vampire genre, and remains the best sci-fi series you’ve never heard of. Discover it in this week’s Deeper Cut.

As we celebrate Halloween, there’s one scary story that hasn’t been told enough. Ultraviolet aired 20 years ago, completely changing the way TV audiences thought about vampires and serving up six episodes of great drama. So why has it never gotten the attention it deserved?

Perhaps because back then, it was breaking new ground. In 1998, the series aired on Britain’s Channel 4 and lasted just one season of six episodes. Writer Joe Ahearne, who’d go on to shows like Doctor Who and Da Vinci’s Demons, was only on his second TV series at the time — and the first that he’d created.

His cast, too, was then mostly unknown. Ahearne had directed Jack Davenport in the comedy-drama series This Life, well before Davenport would become known for Pirates of the Caribbean, Smash, and FlashForward.

Ultraviolet was the TV series Idris Elba did before being cast in The Wire and rocketing into the ranks of Hollywood superstardom. It gave us Stephen Moyer before True Blood and The Gifted.

The two biggest stars were Susannah Harker, who eight years earlier had played the ill-fated journalist in the UK version of House of Cards, and stage veteran Philip Quast, who had already won one Olivier Award and would earn another the same year the show aired.

These were relatively fresh faces. People who would fly under TV’s proverbial radar. But perhaps because of that, they were all brilliant in their roles, playing characters who didn’t fit into the idea of what sci-fi heroes or vampire hunters were supposed to be.

Davenport was the show’s heart as Detective Sergeant Michael Colefield, the police officer who found himself pulled into this supernatural battle by a connection he didn’t even know he had.

In only his fourth TV role, Davenport brought his natural charisma and perfect notes of dry wit to Michael, making him the everyman cop whom audiences could imagine having a beer with and trusting to protect them from a garden-variety bad guy.

But more importantly, he was wonderfully able to convey how the character had such a tremendous heart, and wanted desperately to do the right thing even when he had less and less of an idea what that was.

He had a certain set of skills and a certain way of looking at the world, only to find those both upended because he wasn’t facing normal bad guys anymore. Michael was a character who was allowed to flounder, to struggle, to be bewildered, and Davenport took us through that journey.

More from Television

Michael’s world was blown up in the pilot episode, when he discovered that his fellow cop and best friend Jack Beresford was a vampire. The person he should have trusted most was the one he knew the least, and though Moyer’s role in Ultraviolet wasn’t huge, he played it perfectly.

There was a real transformation in Jack, where it was clear what Michael wanted him to be was not at all what he was, or maybe had ever been. There was no limbo, no idea that perhaps his old mate could get through to him and this was all a misunderstanding. No, Jack was a villain who embraced his new identity, and the show’s biggest disappointment was that it didn’t get a second season to turn friends into full-blown foes.

On the other side of the equation were the established vampire hunters: Vaughan Rice, Angie March and Father Pearse Harman. Each of them had tragic but also engaging personal stories that led them to becoming part of Ultraviolet‘s secret organization. Audiences were clearly able to see what it was in them, or their histories, that made them choose this path, their backstories much richer than just fighting supernatural creatures.

Elba’s Vaughan was an ex-military man who saw the world in black and white, including the battle between humanity and vampires. He was calm, cool and collected in almost every situation, which made the episode where he finally started to crack that much more powerful. He was tough, but he wasn’t emotionless or without compassion.

For one, he was secretly in love with Angie, who remained oblivious to that fact for the entire run of the series. That’s because she was blinded to almost everything by a desire for revenge; at one point she had been married, but her husband was murdered — not by a vampire, but because he became one.

Angie had a near-ruthless hatred of vampires and would do anything to stop them, but that also came with a certain degree of self-loathing (after all, she was working for the organization that killed her husband) and angst at being a single parent. She had to deal with the stress of raising a daughter on her own, but also doing it knowing about threats she couldn’t begin to speak about.

That left Quast to anchor Ultraviolet, just like his character Pearse anchored the organization. He had a steady hand, and he was the one to keep things level when the other characters fought with each other or began to break. But he, too, had his own concerns: he’d be diagnosed with cancer. He needed to fight for his own life, but put that largely aside to fight for the lives of total strangers against an enemy that they didn’t even know existed.

Ahearne’s richly drawn characters, brought to life by an outstanding quartet of actors, were only one-half of what made Ultraviolet so remarkable. The other half was that it looked at vampires in a way no other TV show had before: through the lens of science.

Ultraviolet never once used the word “vampire” in the show itself; instead, they were referred to as “Code Fives.” The show pushed aside all of the conventions and devices of other films and TV series and adopted a scientific approach, replacing stakes and potions with carbon-tipped bullets and gas grenades.

This made the series that much more engaging, because it presented a brand new battlefield that the audience had to figure out, and new rules of play. It was in no way predictable. The viewer saw a vampire-hunting group relying on technological resources, figuring out how to fight an enemy that was invisible to cameras and other electronic devices. These vampires could move about in the daytime, and nobody on this show was turning into a bat.

Along with this more grounded approach, the scripts offered up stories that were relevant to and more connected with the modern era. How was a woman pregnant with a vampire fetus and what was supposed to be done about the baby? Could the existence of vampires mean anything for modern medicine (or worse, experimentation)? Were vampires creating synthetic blood, and if so, were they really the enemies of humankind or could a peaceful resolution be reached?

The latter was particularly compelling and groundbreaking. In Ultraviolet, vampires weren’t just big, scary monsters or played to be sinister all the time. They were written as three-dimensional as the human characters, with their own hopes, goals and agendas. The show didn’t presume that all vampires were evil, or that all humans were good.

Instead, just like humans, vampires could fall anywhere in between. In fact, as was the case with Jack Beresford, being a vampire wound up revealing their true human nature.

The series played no stereotypes, took no shortcuts, and offered up no easy answers. It allowed the audience, often through Michael but sometimes on their own, to decide what was right and what was wrong, and who they were going to follow. It wasn’t always an easy decision.

But it was easy to embrace Ultraviolet. It was a great dramatic TV series that just happened to be about vampires, and that’s what made it brilliant. It put strong drama and great characterization first, and then the supernatural part. It cast four actors who hadn’t been seen in roles like these before, and let them do something different with each role. It dared to throw away decades of genre conventions and take a more complicated approach — and it worked.

It worked so well that an American version of Ultraviolet was attempted a few years later, with Idris Elba reprising his role as Vaughan Rice. The underrated Joanna Going (Kingdom) was the new female lead who brought her own intriguing approach to her character, and Howard Gordon (Homeland, 24) was the executive producer. But despite all of their talents, they couldn’t quite make it click, and the show didn’t get past the pilot.

That’s because Ultraviolet is such a rich, nuanced show that caught something special with its original cast; it’s not something that can be easily translated. Nor is it something that will ever quite come around again. It was a fantastic TV series that was a product of its time, talents and willingness to shatter the mold.

Unfortunately, despite everything Ultraviolet has to offer, it seems to have faded back into the shadows. Hulu had the series available for streaming but now has pulled all but a trailer, the DVD release is long out of print, and you won’t find it on Netflix, iTunes or Amazon Video.

Your best bet is YouTube, but however you locate it, don’t wait any longer to see this exemplary piece of scarily great drama.

Next. American Son is the American play for our generation. dark

Ultraviolet can be found on DVD and YouTube. Find the next Deeper Cut every Wednesday in the Entertainment category at FanSided.