Pillars Of The Earth: There needs to be a term invented that conveys the message, “You might enjoy this show a lot, if you’re a fan of this kind of thing, as long as you don’t need it to be, in any grand sense of the word, actually good.”
The term “guilty pleasure” doesn’t quite apply to a project like Starz’s The Pillars of the Earth, debuting tonight. The miniseries, based on a Ken Follett novel about power struggles and cathedral building in 12th-century England, doesn’t seem guilty about anything at all, nor does it seem to intend guilt on the audience’s part. It’s positively virtuous, in a way: a big, old-fashioned historical epic of sweep and passion and melodrama, hearkening back to the days of the old you-could-learn-something-from-it network miniseries like Shogun.