From my favorite movies..

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I'll keep this short and without spoilers, I found this mini-series to be well crafted, well acted on the most part, it had decent dialogues but a very mediocre story and boring villains. Historic accuracy.. not here, it is however fun.Most actors hit the spot when it comes to filling their role and acting their bit, I particularly liked Abbie Cornish(Belinda) and Tim Blake Nelson(Meeker). The other main cast does a decent job, but doesn't get up to their level.Tim Roth plays Tim Roth which is fine, I liked him in Lie to me, but there's nothing distinguishing about his role in this mini-series, he plays a very generic villain.

Possible Spoiler (s)...Was looking forward to it, if fact glad that another "reality channel" was dipping into the mini-series market such as History with the Hatfields and McCoys. More disappointed in this than the aforementioned. While the H&M on History was over-melodramatic and flirting with silly, it was still riotously entertaining and the performances by the cast were from very good to superb. Most of the cast in Klondike seem to be on lithium. H&M did a great job in developing characters, using every chance they were on screen to expose their motivations, flaws, strengths, and did it through dialogue and interaction with other characters-- even gestures. In Klondike this very important facet of storytelling is handled by one-line descriptions or a pat phrase. The pacing of Klondike is another issue, break neck for twenty minutes and snailish for forty. Tim Roth-- who is soooooo underutilized they could have put a cardboard Tim Roth mask on a mannequin and wheeled him around-- is the resident thug/soulless usurper, but in watching the show you have to wonder if he's not behaving that way out of simple boredom. He seems to bore the hell out of whoever he's threatening, anyway. The business woman (so uninteresting her name escapes me) is also victim to the writing. What drives her? What brought her to Dawson City? Mom died in childbirth? Well if that don't make ya wanna head to the boonies and sell booze, what would? Al Swearingen she ain't. The hooker? Drop me with a preacher and the turnaround is miraculous. Again, couldn't she have fared better as a gal-fer-rent in San Francisco or New York? One would think you have to be pretty motivated to peddle your virtue if you're going to go through all that trouble to find a whorehouse with the Help Wanted sign...? Her transition from saloon trollop to Florence Nightengale strains belief. Richard Madden is serviceable-- again a victim of the script-- but comes nowhere near the performance he gave us in Game of Thrones. Sam Shepard is the only cast member who seems to be trying to inject a little life into his character, but again the limits of the script seem to hogtie him.I won't go into the RCMP or the Natives, but they also fall victim to cliché.The camera work is a delight. The setting spectacular. The mud looks real. Otherwise, an overall disappointment.

The show is slow moving because it is supposed it is supposed to accurate. I believe it is based on a novel by Jack London who visited the Klondike to write about it. Richard Madden is the main character and plays it well except that he hates to wear hats as a personal matter. He was a character in Game of Thrones crossing the frozen landscape and did not wear a hat. Stupid thing to put up with. That show has a powerful ending including a couple minutes of the credits but you have to watch the entire show to get the ending. My suggestion is to record it and binge watch it. remind yourself that the show is supposed to give you a snapshot of many situations that happened in the gold rush.

I was looking at this show with great interest, as my grandfather and his brother first killed a bunch of horses on the White Pass (Dead Horse) trail. Then they hired out as packers on the Golden Staircase of the Chilkoot. Great Uncle Rudy became a popular druggist in Dawson City; Grandpa worked his way through Stanford by taking alternating years as an electrical engineer in the Yukon. One time Uncle Rudy had a shipment of drugs wrecked coming upriver. Grandpa pushed a sled a couple of hundred miles salvaging them because he couldn't get any doge.I liked the first two episodes pretty well, although there were so many howlers ... Bill not freezing to death; people being shot with no consequences, being that the Mounties had the lid on the town; wolves attacking people; I'm not sure that the Mounties were at the top of the Chilkoot enforcing the supply requirements at the very beginning of the Gold Rush. The winter of 97 had the city on starvation rations.Belinda Mulrooney can be googled. She was not lovely. Looks like she could have been a programmer in Silicon Gulch 40 years ago.Father Judge, the "Saint of the Yukon", bought two and a half acres for his St. Mary's Hospital when he came to town from where he had been assigned downriver. After his singlehanded first year, he had nuns for nurses. The show showed his grave marker with an 1898 date. He actually died of pneumonia in 1899. He can also be googled and looks much more refined in his photo than the wild-looking character. The show jumped the shark in the third episode. The Canadians had partnered with the Indians for a hundred years in the fur trade with a lot of intermarriage; The Yukon was not the Wild West with hostiles behind every bush. All of the action was ludicrous. Shooting at an elk with the muzzle right next to a guy's ear. Armed robbery in a tent cabin by an easily identified person. The way they left town ... It would be easier and less dangerous to catch a steamer in the spring.I would have really enjoyed seeing our heroes meeting and coping with the real Soapy Smith in Skagway. He never got to Dawson, and the show version was a buffoon.I watch and enjoy "Reign". Completely unhistorical stories in a historic setting including non-existent hottie royal bastard half- brothers are fun to watch, if the show is actively and openly dealing in piffle. You don't expect it from a Discovery show that touts its verisimilitude.