I love this show but....
....Why they call it Marco Polo ? I mean most of the story is about Kublai Khan and Benedict Wong is amazing .The show should have the title Kublai Khan
shareBecause Marco Polo is the hook. We, the audience, are being introduced to this world through the eyes of this foreigner and it's through him that we can visit the warring factions and understand the society of the era and the Mongol culture. It's much easier for writers to use such a character as that hook to bring us along. As you say, the deeper we go the more we get to know everyone else so Polo becomes less central but he was the reason we got into that world in the first place.
shareAnd - who hasn't heard of Marco Polo growing up? Not even the merchant but the game you played as a kid.
The name recognition is huge. I had never heard of Kublai Khan before this show.
yeah you might be right. it's for the western audience, so the studio need something to easily related to the audience. The irony is Marco Polo was the most boring main char of the series, to me at least . . .
shareExactly. The show is Western-centric, even if Netflix is trying to appeal to a "global audience." Marco Polo as the white Westerner that's our "in" into the foreignness of medieval Asia only partially works.
Also, Marco feels like a boring character cuz the writers don't know what the hell to do with him. In the actual Travels of Marco Polo, he's mostly just an observer of Asian cultures as he trades along the Silk Road. But for TV, he needs to be dramatized so that the main character is not just a camera lens. So the writers make up this story of his father's abandonment and his imprisonment at Cambulac, and throw in a pointless romance. In Season 1, what was most frustrating for me was the inconsistency of his characterization -- we never know where Marco stood: sometimes he's suspicious outsider, sometimes he's the Khan's confidante, one minute he's rotting in jail, the next he's getting some quality father-son bonding time with Kublai. It felt very schizophrenic. Season 2 evens it out more believably, but it definitely felt like the writers were finding their footing in the first season.