This series was disappointing for me. I saw Pillars of the Earth which was very good and so I was expecting something better.
I didn't give this series a one-star rating because the costumes were very well-made and some of the cast like Miranda Richardson, Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Nora von Waldstätten performed very well.
But there were too many rape scenes, and I didn't like the incest. Is it really necessary to show incest in so many TV series? The anti-Catholic theme (lesbian nuns, gay monks, evil prior, executing healers, old priest draining blood) was over-the-top. In reality, most at that time in history were very religious and their behaviour was influenced by the fear of eternal hell-fire.
People were unrealistically naive and too easily fooled by Godwyn and his mother as they kept on murdering people, episode after episode.
I was disappointed in the then age 14 Edward III being cast as an age 33 actor in the first episode. Later we do not see his beautiful wife, and first-born son, just his third child Joan. The old queen mother had no power after 1330, yet we see her and Joan trying to manipulate Edward into going to war with France.
Edward III is cast as an indecisive, wimpish, dark-haired little man, but was in fact very confident, tall, broad-shouldered and fair-haired (a typical Plantagenet in appearance). Edward III has been one of my favourite people in history since I first read about him as child, so I was unhappy to see him portrayed this way.
Was that battle in France supposed to be the Battle of Crécy? It happened nothing like what is shown! In fact, the French in far superior numbers attacked with crossbowmen and mounted knights, and were slaughtered by the longbows. Where is Edward's son the Black Prince? He was just a 16-year-old at Crécy, yet did very well in the midst of the heaviest fighting.
There is plenty of interesting drama in real history during that time period, like the story of how Edward took Calais. But of course the producers decided to ignore that.
