The go-for-broke horrors of Penny Dreadful

You can say this for Penny Dreadful: It always knows how to make a first impression. Earlier this week, the Showtime horror drama began its second season with a stunner of a opening, as Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) strolls through a pristine, snow-covered park. It looks like a lovely time — until she's beset, once again, by a servant of the devil:

It's a classic Penny Dreadful moment: a scene that's simultaneously gorgeous, creepy, and campy, and played with unflagging commitment by the absurdly talented actresses at its center. But after a clever, striking freshman season that established it as TV's most compelling horror series last year, the second season presents a new challenge: How long can the series maintain this high-wire act without falling?

Horror stories — which rely on the idea that no one is safe — almost always benefit from brevity. In basic structure, FX's American Horror Story has a more horror-friendly approach than Penny Dreadful; because it resets every year, it can parcel out wild, horrific consequences for its characters without worrying about how they'll handle the next season. Something like The Twilight Zone or Tales From the Crypt — anthology series that reset with a new cast and story every single episode — is even better.

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The primary challenge in Penny Dreadful's second season is topping a first season that pitted its protagonists against monsters, vampires, and the Devil — and, most pivotally, each other. When Penny Dreadful premiered last year, it cleverly disguised the fact that it was, well, Franksteined together from the narratives of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. It wasn't until the end of the pilot that we learned the doctor played by Harry Treadaway was Victor Frankenstein. It wasn't until episode two that we met Frankenstein's vengeful monster (Rory Kinnear), who was created before the series began. It wasn't until the finale that Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) was formally revealed as a werewolf (though, to be fair, the series could hardly have made that twist more obvious). It took an entire season for Penny Dreadful to unveil itself as an adults-only, 21st century riff on The Monster Squad — an uncharacteristic bit of restraint for a show that draws so much power from relentless gonzo horror.

It's also a trick the series can't repeat. That may be for the best; while the narrative coyness was a smart foundation on which to build Penny Dreadful's first season, it's actually out of tradition with the cheap literary magazines that give the series its title. In the 19th century, publishers of serialized "penny dreadful" stories, so named for their low price and grotesque content, gave them titles like "Varney the Vampire," "Wagner the Wehr-Wolf," and "The Horrors of Zindorf Castle" — luring in readers by putting the lurid content upfront. The second season plays right into that tradition as it wastes no time dabbling in a few more transgressions, including necrophilia and infanticide.

It also wisely introduces a new face for all this evil: Evelyn Poole (Helen McRory), a spiritualist who leads a group of homicidal witches called the Nightcomers. Poole is actually, technically, an old face — we first met her as the host of the seance that marked one of the first season's most memorable scenes. But as usual, Penny Dreadful buried her worst secrets under the surface; she's reintroduced cheerily lounging, Elizabeth Bathory-style, in a bathtub full of blood.

This is Penny Dreadful at its strongest: weird, gory, unpredictable, and visually striking. But while the villains have never been sharper or more menacing, the heroes, unfortunately, have been almost wholly defanged. After spending seven episodes building up a complicated web of conflicting goals and motivations for its enigmatic ensemble cast, Penny Dreadful's first season ended with an unexpected (and unconvincing) note of sentimentality, as Dr. Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) killed his real daughter to save his adopted daughter (Eva Green).

The primary failing of Penny Dreadful's second season is that its main characters have grown too chummy. Sir Malcolm and Vanessa are a makeshift family; Ethan (Josh Hartnett) is a welcome guest (and a likely love interest for Vanessa). Everyone's a little too friendly now; the show was more interesting when it was about a bunch of messed-up strangers forced to band together despite their entirely justified mistrust. And given the show's willingness to ruthlessly kill off more intriguing characters like Abraham Van Helsing and Mina Harker in its first season, I'm not sure why Penny Dreadful is still bothering with less interesting characters like Frankenstein's monster (Rory Kinnear) and Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney); their stories were largely disconnected from last year's central narrative, and so far, the second season has the same problem.

Still, when this show is really working — as in a ridiculously creepy scene that closes out this upcoming Sunday's episode — there's nothing quite as go-for-broke on premium television. Penny Dreadful can be uneven, but that's the price of taking some risks — and when it comes to horror, that's less a bug than a feature.

Penny Dreadful airs on Showtime on 10 p.m. EST. You can watch the season 2 premiere here.