Peeps, have you seen Vikings? It’s pretty fricking nifty.

I first started watching it after seeing all the chatter on the facebooks and the twitterers. People seemed to think this Vikings show was a pretty decent watch, and what’s more it was a production of the History Channel. Well, I thought to myself, self, that is weirdness. Let us watch and determine for ourselves. And so, we did. I did. Whatevs.

It was really good.

Because I can’t come up with a better description, here’s how The History Channel describes it: Vikings follows the adventures of Ragnar Lothbrok the greatest hero of his age. The series tells the sagas of Ragnar’s band of Viking brothers and his family, as he rises to become King of the Viking tribes. As well as being a fearless warrior, Ragnar embodies the Norse traditions of devotion to the gods, legend has it that he was a direct descendant of Odin, the god of war and warriors.

It reminds me of Spartacus for some reason, even though it doesn’t have the high melodrama of that beloved show. Maybe it’s because Vikings is clearly not filmed in the US, has an Australian actor as the lead, and the actors do a (mostly) admirable job of speaking with a vaguely Norse accent, though I did catch Travis Fimmel’s Oz accent on one word in the latest ep – brought joy to my heart, it did 🙂

The visuals are stunning. Filmed in Ireland, there’s a real sense of otherworldness brought to the shebang by the outstanding locations. The costumes, make up and hair is phenom, and the props and set design seems amazingly authentic.

The writing is also pretty nifty. While there are some stock characters (Ragnar’s brother Rollo has yet to evolve beyond the ‘oh my, I am jealous of my more successful brother and seek to undermine him in a myriad of ways’), Ragnar himself, his battlemaid wife Lagertha, the manic and unpredictable Floki and to a certain extent English monk-turned-prisoner-turned-Viking convert Athelstan are extremely well-drawn characters. Time is compressed in an awesomely no-nonsense way, with months passing with an ad break. The story moves at a fast clip, and it’s truly unpredictable. Also, the action scenes are outstanding.

BTW, peeps Travis Fimmel? Yeah. He’s this guy:

Crazy, no? I actually prefer how he looks in Vikings. Am I weird for saying that??