Why it matters
It is one of the clearer live-action television attempts to make steampunk into an ongoing adventure format, complete with Verne, airships, secret societies and Victorian gadgetry.
The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne takes the author of scientific romance and promotes him to action hero, which is either literary tribute or a very elaborate staffing decision.
Created by Gavin Scott, the series imagines a young Jules Verne drawn into extraordinary adventures with Phileas Fogg, Rebecca Fogg and Passepartout. The key machine is the Aurora, an airship that gives the show its most immediate steampunk credential and its best excuse to treat the nineteenth century as a departure lounge for improbable trouble.
The premise is wonderfully direct. Rather than adapting Verne's novels straight, it turns Verne into the sort of man who might have lived the adventures before writing them. That trick places the series in the same literary playground as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, though with a more television-adventure temperament and fewer signs that everyone involved has read the footnotes with a knife.
Its place in the canon comes from visibility as much as execution. Around 2000, steampunk was still not a default television category. A weekly series built around airships, Vernean invention, secret conspiracies and Victorian action was a bold enough proposition to deserve attention, even if the show did not become a permanent fixture of the mainstream schedule.
The Aurora matters because steampunk television needs a home base. It gives the series an image, a route and a promise: the world is large, modernity is arriving early, and the heroes can reach the next crisis without waiting for a sensible train connection. Airships can be overused in the genre, but this is one of the cases where the machine does honest structural work.
The series also sits neatly beside Q.E.D. and The Wild Wild West. All three show television working out how to combine period adventure with invention and mystery. Jules Verne is the most openly steampunk of the group, with the author himself serving as mascot, witness and participant.
It is not a flawless machine. Some effects and rhythms belong very much to their television moment. Yet that is part of its charm. The show feels like a turn-of-the-millennium attempt to bolt the full steampunk kit onto episodic adventure and see how far the rivets would hold.
The secret-society material is also important. Steampunk television needs more than attractive machinery; it needs a reason for that machinery to keep producing trouble. Conspiracies, hidden knowledge and elite clubs provide exactly that. They let each episode feel as if the visible Victorian world is only the shopfront, while the back room contains devices, grudges and very expensive bad judgement.
The series also has archival value for the boom that followed. Later film, comics, games and cosplay culture would make airship steampunk feel familiar, even expected. This show was trying to make that language work as live-action television before the look had become a default menu option. That gives it a slightly experimental charge, even when the adventure beats are cheerfully old-fashioned.
Is it really steampunk?
Yes. The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne is core television steampunk: Victorian adventure, Vernean science, airship travel, secret societies and retro-invention all sit at the centre of the format.
It suits readers who want the field's live-action television branch, where the boiler room has signed a co-production deal and Jules Verne has somehow become a man of action.
Find it
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