Alexandra has been kidnapped and sold into slavery for the harem of the Ottoman sultan. Refusing to accept defeat, she instead decides to fight back - pitting herself against the powerful women of the harem, and the princesses of the royal family.
Meanwhile, Suleiman ascends to the throne of the Ottoman Empire to face intrigue and treachery all around. In a world that expects to dominate him, he must find a way to make his mark on history.
With lavish production values, filmed mostly on location at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Magnificent Century claimed to have a global audience of over 200 million during its four season story run.
Well...
I started watching this Turkish historical drama about the Ottoman Empire a while back, after Jane Johnson (editor for GRRM, Robin Hobb, and Joe Abercrombie) happened to mention it in an interview. The episodes are freely available to watch on YouTube with English subtitles, so I fired up episode 1.
I expected to find something cheesy, slow, and a bit tacky. The first few minutes before the opening credits hardly did much to challenge that.
And yet...the first episode kept me engaged enough to want to see what happened next. My wife and eldest daughter both drifted in, showing an interest.
So I made the decision to play it for all the family to watch over the following tea-time. If they thought it was rubbish, then at worse I'd exposed them to a little Turkish. We might pick up a couple of useful words for our holiday there later this year. And then we'd move onto something else.
Surprisingly, even my youngest daughter sat through all 1h 40m of it. Everyone wanted to see the next episode.
Somehow my entire family all ended up becoming addicted to it, before we even realised it had happened.
Now, each episode is quite long - usually around 1h 40m, but sometimes longer. And the subtitles are very amateur: at times they are frustratingly slow; at other times they are laugh-out-loud funny for how bad they are.
And sometimes the pace really does slow to a crawl. There is some repetition, and the editing could have shortened some episodes significantly. There was also a period around episodes 10-12 when we groaned at certain star-crossed lovers meeting, and shouted at the TV for them to just get on with it.
But, get this: it can be an incredibly engrossing story that gets under the skin. At times it's simply a soap opera. But it's always entertaining. And it's often surprising. Some of the cliffhangers are astonishing.
Even more so is that it's family friendly: no nudity, no gore. Having watched season 1 to completion, I suddenly feel that too much Western TV uses nudity and gore as crutches to cover bad writing. Yes, I'm looking at you Game of Thrones and The Tudors, whose producers think that people can't be entertained by character-driven drama. Magnificent Century proves them wrong.
And that's what this series is - a powerful character-driven episodic drama, with sweeping story arcs. And it isn't afraid to portray complex characters, who can invite our sympathies one moment, only to demand our condemnation in another.
In terms of production values it's not as sharp as many Western shows. But Meral Okay, the sole writer for seasons 1 and 2, has done a wonderful job of bringing a large cast to life, and created some truly formidable women for the screen.
The really big surprise is that it doesn't seem to have ever had an official release into English-speaking markets. IMO, that's our loss.
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