Period Shows I Bailed On

As you can see, I have been making my way pretty quickly through the historical movies and tv options on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. I'm always craving that new show that I will fall in love with, which means I have taken a chance on some things that ended up not being my jam. Here is a recap:

The English Game

The previews and promo images for this show include women in bustles which made me think I would like it. Also: Old-timey sports fashion! Class conflict! What looks like the same mill where North & South was shot! It is about football (I think the "soccer" kind of football but not 100% sure) but I stupidly was like "maybe there won't be so much of that."

I made it to the first game (match?) and remembered something about sports-focused movies/tv. They aren't just going to talk about the sport and do some sports things briefly. The whole show will hinge on long game scenes in which each play is important and you have to focus because some detail of what happened will shape the characters and their motivations I was just like...

My recommended fix: 

Less sportsball. More bustles. Or maybe change the sport to something women can play while wearing bustles? I guess what I really want is an extended version of the archery scene in Daniel Deronda.

YEP, THIS IS IT

Turn: Washington's Spies

I keep seeing this on the list of historical shows on Netflix (yes, the Netflix algorithm gives me a "historical TV shows" category) and finally I gave it a shot.

Why I thought I might like it:

• As has already been documented, I enjoy the fancy jacket and knee pants look of 18th century menswear. This promised to have lots of that.
• J.J. Field is in it and he is delightful
• History stuff
• The first episode had a content warning for sex but not violence so that seemed promising

But here are some things I don't like, which I probably should have guessed would have been part of a story about spies during the American Revolution.

• Stories about wars and battles 
• Shows where most of the cast are men and all the main storylines are about men
• Stories where characters are constantly in tense and dangerous situations

So SHOCKINGLY I didn't enjoy it and gave up. But the biggest insult was that J. J. Field's character had a wig with these awful little white rat-tail braids.

Recommended fix:

Is there a way to make a show with a bunch of military uniforms that isn't like, about a war? Or about the British army but somehow not be super problematic and colonialist? Maybe a show where J. J. Field's character clips off the braids and goes around the country saying nice things to ladies in that Alan Rickman deep voice he has?

Maybe he can talk about muslin

Dickensian

Ok, my bad on the other shows, but this one really should have been up my alley. Dickensian takes a bunch of characters from Charles Dickens books and puts them together for a new story. I mean, I seem like the exact target demographic for that.

I gave this a two-episode try, but finally had to admit that I wasn't enjoying it all and didn't look forward to anything about how it would unfold. The main problem was that it was a prequel to the action of the books where all these characters appear. In the first episode there was this young woman named Amelia whose father had died, and she seemed like she was going to be one of the lead characters. Only near the end of the first episode do we learn her last name: Havisham.

Uh oh

I know that origin stories are hot these days, but it does take some of the suspense out of it. This gal is going to fall in love and it isn't going to go great.

But it will be Goth AF

The same goes for the other leading lady. Her name was less familiar, but some internet searching and I realized she was the future Lady Deadlock from Bleak House. Ah ok. So I now know exactly how her story will play out.

She ends up very happy and fulfilled

The inevitability just seemed to take all the fun out of it. Plus, there wasn't much fun to be had in the first place. The show interpreted "Dickensian" to mean "dark and gritty" without much joy and humor also found in his stories. Watching the rest of the episodes seemed like a slog.

Recommended fix:

Why do a prequel? Why not connect all these characters after the main action of their stories and have them all go in surprising and unexpected directions? You could start where Our Mutual Friend leaves off (the final completed novel) with the enigmatic Mortimer Lightwood walking off into the night. Mortimer spends most of Our Mutual Friend being detached and sardonic, but he is also shown to be compassionate and kindhearted. He is observant, critical of the follies of London society, unmarried, and you can reasonably interpret him as gay or bi. Wouldn't he be an interesting character to follow into a new story?

For the record this is a legitimately good idea.

Some Big Opinions About Little Dorrit

I needed a break from my Wolf Hall obsession so decided to revisit another Claire Foy vehicle Little Dorrit (2008). I saw it about a decade ago and remember it being enjoyable but not anything for my list of favorites.

After rewatching I found it...surprisingly tiresome. It is one of those Dickens stories where the good characters are perfect to the point of being dull, the bad characters are dastardly evil, and the funny characters are goofy beyond belief. In order to make it "fresh" and "exciting" Andrew Davies makes everything more quirky and more dramatic. It is also seven hours.

This character is literally named Mr. Tite Barnacle

But I certainly have the time and can usually put up with a lot of nonsense and still enjoy the journey.  But by the end of Little Dorrit I felt there were a few too many sour notes I just couldn't get over.

First of all, there is the character of Tattycoram. She is a servant who works for a wealthy family, primarily as companion for their vapid daughter. In this adaptation she is played by a Black actress (Freema Agyeman). Period movies should have more diversity and during the early episodes it seems like the casting choice adds an interesting layer to her story. The people she works for act like she is "family" while ordering her around and imagining that she enjoys fetching shawls and parasols. When she bristles at their requests she is told she is "wicked" and needs to control her temper. Wow some important commentary there about white people expecting cheerful docility from Black people and then being shocked when they seem angry all the time.

Tattycoram is befriended by Miss Wade, who tells her that she isn't wicked and her anger and frustration are valid. She offers shelter and protection if she ever wants to leave her employers. She eventually does...and then her story sort of fizzles out.

Dickens didn't intend Tattycoram to be black and also had no concept of writing a story about a woman of color. Let's be honest, he can barely write interesting women. The series was then adapted by Andrew Davies, who is also a white man. What starts as a potentially illuminating storyline about a black Victorian woman ends up going nowhere.

Miss Wade turns out to be sort of sketchy and it is hinted that she and Tattycoram have a romantic relationshiop -- not in a fun way but more predatory which is its own problematic can of worms. We see Tattycoram in the background of scenes looking unhappy, slowly realizing that Miss Wade is bad news, and eventually she leaves. In the final scene we see her...back with her original employers.

I DID WHAT?!

Nothing is said about how or why. We are left to wonder whether her absence helped her employers realize they need to treat her better, whether nothing has changed and her story reflects a cruel reality for Black women during this period, or whether we are supposed to think she "learned her lesson" and now is happy to be ordered around. Keep in mind, in other storylines, Little Dorrit is anything but ambiguous. It is full of lessons and moral messages. So it feels like the the filmmakers wanted a gold star for having a more diverse cast but didn't want to actually follow through with having the story go anywhere.

Similarly upsetting is the treatment of Flora Finching. Lead character Arthur Clennam (Matthew Macfadyen) is back from living in China for about 20 years, and he goes to visit his childhood sweetheart Flora (Ruth Jones). When they were young they wanted to marry but their families cruelly kept them apart. She is now a widow and so he is eager to rekindle the connection. When she sweeps into the room the music stops and HORROR...she got fat!

Arthur recoils and we are supposed to as well. Flora is an incessant chatterbox and her costuming is overly-youthful and fussy -- to make her seem as silly as possible. She is annoying and seems to have little self-awareness. But the main joke is clearly that she is unattractive and past her prime and so it is comical that she still imagines a man her own age may be interested in her. Arthur ends up with (spoiler) the titular "Little Dorrit" who is half his age and so petite that she is often mistaken for a child.

Dickens had some fun opinions about ideal women

Rather than finding Flora's scenes funny, I found them grating. To the minor credit of Macfadyen and the director, they don't make it worse by having Arthur gagging and rolling his eyes every time she flirted with him. Instead he was polite and kind. But Arthur gets two romantic interests who are in their early 20s and many business opportunities and life experiences in front of him. Flora, a woman his same age, is past her usefulness to society. No amount of bad makeup, silly clothing, and awkward chatter will hide the fact that a patriarchal system royally screwed this woman.

This is what actress Ruth Jones looks like irl

So while there were some fun moments, Little Dorrit didn't win me over. It just felt like an over-dramatized version of a story which wasn't that great in the first place.