Tut at least signifies an attempt to attract a broader audience beyond fans of, say, mixed martial-arts fighting and SpongeBob SquarePants reruns with a respectable TV epic that gets a lot of things right about King Tut's reign.
The three-night six-hour miniseries... offers occasionally beautiful production design, but mostly Tut serves soggy melodrama that embraces every boy-to-king cliche one might imagine.
Suitably blood-drenched and lavish, but narratively hollow, Spike's new mini-series Tut is about as slow moving as the titular boy king's mummified corpse, and feels just as fresh.
The good special effects, interiors and locations help keep our heads in the past, as do the actors' committed performances. In a better world, destiny, the gods and opportunity would have given the actors a better way to use their talent.
Tut has all of the makings for a powerful re-entry into scripted programming for Spike TV, unfortunately the series falls short, giving it more of a soap opera feel, than the epic saga that I'd hoped for.
Tut's cast is comprised of young actors with matinee-idol good looks that makes for a consistently attractive viewing experience, nonetheless hampered by an undeniable superficial quality.
