Arabian Nights (TV miniseries)

Arabian Nights is a twopart 2000 AmericanBritish miniseries, adapted by Peter Barnes his last film from Sir Richard Francis Burtons translation of the medieval epic One Thousand and One Nights. Mili Avital and Dougray Scott star as Scheherazade and Shahryar respectively. Produced by Dyson Lovell and directed by Steve Barron, the serial was made by Hallmark Entertainment and originally broadcast over two nights onApril andMay 2000 on BBC One in the United Kingdom and ABC in the United States.

The series starts in Baghdad at an undetermined time since the story teller seems to live during the 8th century, but the stories that are told take place during the era of muskets, Englishmen, and queueera Chinese hairstyles, which means they take place in the 17th century at the earliest. The Sultan Shahryar Dougray Scott has gone mad after accidentally killing his treacherous wife during a failed coup dtat, which she had planned with Shahryars brother Schahzenan James Frain. In his madness, Shahryar believes that all women now want to kill him, but the law states that the Sultan must be married again or the throne will be passed to his brother. Shahryar therefore orders Grand Vizier JaFar Jim Carter to bring him one of his concubines from the harem to marry and then have executed the next day.In order to prevent this, the Grand Viziers clever daughter, Scheherazade Mili Avital, decides to marry the Sultan herself. Scheherazade a childhood friend of the Sultan who has secretly fallen in love with him has a plan to prevent her execution and at the same time cure the Sultan of his madness. With the help of some tutoring from a bazaar storyteller Alan Bates, Scheherazade tells the Sultan a story every night, stopping at dawn with a cliffhanger and refusing to continue until dusk. Shahryar must therefore let Scheherazade live for another day in order to hear the rest of the story. Cunningly, Scheherazade has hidden a moral within every story, to bring the Sultan out of his madness. ........

Source: Wikipedia