Robin Hood

The Forest is Not a Playground

Every generation gets the Robin Hood it deserves, though it is often unclear what we have done to deserve so many. From Errol Flynn’s Technicolor exuberance to Kevin Costner’s mullet-sporting Americanism, the legend of the outlaw remains cinema’s most flexible, and exhausted, metaphor. In 2025, MGM+ and creators Jonathan English and John Glenn offer an answer that feels inevitable for our current cultural mood: a Robin Hood that is less about swashbuckling joy and more about the grinding, claustrophobic weight of occupation. This is not a romp; it is an insurgency.

The series, simply titled *Robin Hood*, sheds the "Prince of Thieves" subtitle and the merry affectations of its predecessors. Instead, it leans heavily into the visual language of "prestige TV"—a world of desaturated greens, muddy hems, and candlelit conspiratorial whispers. Shot in the rugged landscapes of Serbia, the production design creates a tactile, suffocating reality. The forest here is not a whimsical playground for men in tights; it is a terrifying borderland where the displaced hide from a colonial power. The directors employ a shaky, intimate camera style that treats the violence not as spectacle, but as a messy, desperate struggle for survival.

At the center of this grim retelling is the dynamic between Rob (Jack Patten) and Marian (Lauren McQueen), which serves as the series' emotional anchor. The script wisely reconfigures their relationship from a fairy-tale courtship into a political bridge between the Saxon underclass and the Norman occupiers. Patten plays Rob not as a fully formed superhero, but as a young man hardened by trauma—specifically the systematic stripping of his family’s land. There is a specific, haunting sequence early in the series involving the dispossession of Rob’s home that sets the tone: it is bureaucratic cruelty enforced by the sword. This Robin Hood is radicalized by policy as much as by poverty.

However, the show’s ambition to be the *Game of Thrones* of Nottingham sometimes collapses under its own self-seriousness. In its rush to be "grounded," the narrative occasionally stumbles into historical absurdity—such as a puzzling inclusion of Pagan rituals in 12th-century England—mistaking grimness for depth. Yet, these tonal wobbles are often steadied by the presence of Sean Bean as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Casting Bean, an actor synonymous with noble martyrdom (Boromir, Ned Stark), as the villain is a stroke of meta-textual genius. He plays the Sheriff not as a mustache-twirling caricature, but as a weary pragmatist enforcing order in a chaotic world. His performance gives the "villain" a terrifying rationality that the "hero" must dismantle.

Ultimately, this iteration of *Robin Hood* succeeds because it refuses to treat the legend as a given. It asks us to look at the mechanisms of oppression—the tax collectors, the soldiers, the complicit lords—and see them as ordinary parts of a broken system. It may lack the joyous bounce of the 1938 classic, but it offers something more resonant for 2025: a portrait of resistance that feels earned, bloody, and surprisingly human. It suggests that before you can become a legend, you first have to survive the mud.