You don’t hate Hollywood enough. ~ Online memeI’m not sure why I went into the 2025 Robin Hood series genuinely hopeful, considering how rarely contemporary retellings honor the stories they touch. This was a childhood story I loved—bright, mythic, morally clear—and I naïvely thought a modern reboot might honor that legacy. Instead, we got yet another legend mangled through the modern meat-grinder of “reinterpretation” and drained of its soul.
The show opens with Hugh Locksley teaching young Rob about his supposed Saxon “heritage” and Aedric, a purely invented folk hero with no basis in the medieval legends, who is transformed into a stag after consummating his marriage to the wood nymph Godda. The Saxons are recast as persecuted pagans suffering under the conquering Catholic Normans—an absurd premise, considering the Anglo-Saxons had already converted centuries earlier, beginning when St. Augustine arrived in 597. The historical illiteracy is so blatant it borders on parody.
While the production values are undeniably strong—handsome sets, solid costumes, polished cinematography—none of that compensates for the heavy-handed anti-Catholic framing, the overwrought melodrama, or the obligatory streaming-era “updates,” including the jarringly anachronistic extras and a gratuitous sex scene with Priscilla of Nottingham. It all plays less like storytelling and more like box-checking.
Ten episodes in all—I stopped after the first. I simply couldn’t get past how thoroughly they butchered the story I grew up loving, stripping away even the medieval tradition of Robin Hood’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
I was sincerely looking forward to this adaptation, but it’s yet another childhood tale refashioned into something unrecognizable—another classic sacrificed on the implacable altar of modernity, in thrall to the compulsive need to corrupt every wholesome, time-tested story for the sake of "the message," until nothing of its original character remains.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, December 5th, Feast of St. John Almond, one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales