Syfy
Elliot Knight (from l.), Junix Inocian and Marama Corlett star in Syfy’s “Sinbad.”
Once upon a time, every schoolchild had heard the adventures of Sinbad, whose seven voyages on the seven seas drew on and sometimes helped shape tales of classic mythology.
With less classic mythology in circulation these days, Sinbad has morphed into a more modern adventurer, a journey reflected in the 2003 movie and now in this new Syfy series.
Saturday night’s opening episode fits comfortably into Syfy’s mission of the scary and the supernatural.
It does, however, remove virtually the whole spiritual underpinning of the original tales. As they have come down through history, from origins whose trail we pick up only at a midpoint, the Sinbad stories were interwoven with his faith in Allah and the ways in which Allah works.
This Sinbad (Elliot Knight) still deals with forces, and monsters, that fall outside the realm of rational explanation. There are curses and inexplicable physical occurrences.
But at least at the outset, the character feels less like a traveler on a spiritual quest than a kinsman of Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow from “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
This first of 12 episodes quickly gives him a very different and more haunting backstory than the original tales. Instead of a dissolute son of wealth, for starters, he’s a street hustler.
After that part of his life ends badly, the show sends him out to sea with a new made-for-TV family — the Old Salt Gunnar (Elliot Cowan), the crafty con woman Rina (Marama Corlett) and the exotic Nala (Estrella Daniels).
It’s still a basically good-hearted guy against a mean old world. But the modernizing makeover has taken away some of what made Sinbad last so many centuries in the first place.
dhinckley@nydailynews.com
