Is Netflix's Frontier better than Taboo?

Netflix's new historical drama Frontier, about the 18th-century North American fur trade, covers similar terrain to Tom Hardy's Taboo, but can it match the BBC hit?

The six-part series, now available on Netflix UK, stars Game of Thrones' star Jason Momoa as a part-Irish, part-Native American renegade on a mission to break the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly on the Canadian fur trade.

It's an epic tale of revenge with a brooding, testosterone-charged protagonist, exploring the volatile relationship between corporate colonisers, Europeans and indigenous populations – all themes that can be found in Taboo.

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"Television and movie producers have a weird habit of doubling-up on big ideas, delivering two projects with more or less the same basic concept at roughly the same time," Noel Murray at Rolling Stone says.

In Taboo, continues the critic, Hardy plays James Delaney, a shipping tycoon's long-lost son stirring up trouble with the East India Company. Meanwhile, Frontier features Momoa as Declan Harp, "another aristocrat's rogue offspring" sabotaging the Hudson's Bay Company.

Both characters are "burly, violent men, with eerily similar backstories involving ancient mysticism and colonialist dads who diddled the natives".

Added to that, the two shows are "grubby and earthy", with a cast of "oily upperclass villains and scrappy underworld types", says Murray, so how best to choose which "historical, tough-guy-on-a-vengeance-quest dramas is right for you?"

Murray favours Taboo for acting, film-quality production design and "overall weightiness", but says Frontier has more defined characters and straightforward genre kicks. If you're really ambitious, he says, watch both and "you'll be able to answer just about any trivia question about British trade routes in the pre-Victorian era".

Tristram Fane Saunders at the Daily Telegraph has a winner - Frontier has "a thing or two to teach Taboo", he says.

Hardy's hit has star power, production values and snappy dialogue, argues the critic, but it can "prize thrills over coherence" and historical accuracy. Frontier, however, has the "nit-picking" approach to history you would expect from its developers, Discovery Channel Canada.

Ultimately, says Fane Saunders, the "unsubtle low-budget alternative acts as a kind of TV litmus test: everything Taboo gets wrong, Frontier gets right".

However, Todd VanDerWerff at Vox thinks Frontier resembles Game of Thrones more than Taboo, "with its massive, sprawling cast divided among numerous locations and its love of unexpected violence and gore".

The result is "a mess", he says.

According to the critic, Frontier forgets the number one rule of serialised television: "start small, then get big." Still, he admits, "there's a good show buried somewhere" and it may emerge in season two.