Robin Hood

The Mud and the Myth of Sherwood

I really thought Robin Hood had been exhausted as a screen property. After Kevin Costner’s sincerity, Russell Crowe’s gloom, and whatever exactly Taron Egerton was doing in that fitted leather jacket, the legend seemed tapped out. So when MGM+ announced a new 10-episode version from John Glenn and Jonathan English, my first response was a weary eye-roll. We all know the iconography: green clothes, bow, arrows, robbing the rich. But this 2025 series isn’t interested in replaying the comforting stuff. It wants to drag the whole myth through the mud of 12th-century England and leave you feeling the cold in your bones.



It plays less like a jaunty adventure than a grim political origin story. Glenn and English lean hard into the Saxon-Norman class divide, shaping Rob (Jack Patten) as a displaced, angry young man well before he becomes a legend. The whole production sits under a very obvious *Game of Thrones* cloud. You see it in the gray skies, the abrupt bursts of brutality, and especially in the presence of Sean Bean as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Bean gives the Sheriff a tired, heavy authority. He isn’t some cackling villain. He feels like a worn-out administrator trying to keep a violent territory under control while also dealing with a conniving daughter, played by Lydia Peckham. The way he sinks into that tall wooden chair says more about the fatigue of power than any speech could.



The show is also undeniably odd. I’m not sure it ever fully settles on a single tone. One minute it’s brooding over exile and class tension; the next it’s veering into faerie lore and unexpectedly explicit romance. Lucy Mangan at *The Guardian* affectionately called it "the most gloriously bad TV offering of the year," adding that it "ticks every box you could wish for in your olde worlde trash." That’s harsh, but not unfair. The pacing lurches around. Even so, there’s a rough-edged sincerity to the whole thing that makes it hard to dismiss.



Patten is the main reason it hangs together. The 28-year-old Australian actor reportedly spent weeks in Serbia enduring 80-hour archery bootcamps, and you can see that work in the way he carries the bow. When he draws, his shoulders lock with practiced force. The weapon looks necessary in his hands, not ornamental. His scenes with Lauren McQueen’s Marian help too; she’s thankfully written as a politically alert Norman lord’s daughter rather than dead weight waiting to be rescued. Late in the season, there’s a quiet beat by the fire where Patten lets Rob’s whole body sag under the strain of a rebellion he never really meant to lead. It’s brief, but it lands. Whether the show’s chaotic ambition feels like a liability or part of its charm probably depends on how much medieval melodrama you can stomach. Either way, for once the outlaw doesn’t feel like a museum piece. He feels dangerous again.