HARLOTS REVIEW HULU SERIES
Fanny gave birth at the end of S1, and her baby is in now many scenes, with Margaret saying, “you can keep your baby … till she’s weened.” Violet and Amelia’s lesbian crush from the first series is the inspiration for Amelia to petition for Violet’s prison sentence to be lessened. The connection / attraction between Harriet and William hinted at in the final ep of last season gets her thrown out by Margaret Wells at the start of the first episode, and William follows. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, the loose ends are followed up immediately. Consider this my obligatory “yes, it’s on, it has pretty frocks, the story’s still fun, go watch it!” post then. Sometimes, it’s easier to write about a new series than an ongoing one! Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying watching the continuing travails of the dueling whorehouses, but I don’t have a ton that’s new to say about it. So you’d think we’d have plenty to say about the second series … except, well, here’s the thing. We also interviewed Hallie Rubenhold, whose first book, Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies: Sex in the City in Georgian Britain, was the real-life source material for some of the fictional Harlots setting. We did write several articles about the first season, discussing the hairstyles, the recycled costumes, some weird costumes, and the historically accurate treatment of race in Georgian London. It feels like an unnecessary course correction to bring viewers ensorcelled by the costumes back to the realities of the sex trade.People keep asking us to review the second season of Harlots (2018), which premiered on Hulu over the summer and has been renewed for a third season. (This is a lavish period drama, from the cast’s towering wigs to their prime opera boxes.) There’s a tendency to deliver thuddingly obvious moments of exposition amid all the finery. The show is at once aware of the struggles its characters undergo and a bit drunk on how gloriously kitted-out their world is. Her astringency is a welcome check on Harlots‘ more questionable turns. When Lucy says they don’t fit, Margaret retorts, “Make ’em.” She’s trying to merge mother and pimp, benefactor and boss. She gives Lucy a pair of unflatteringly ornate yellow shoes to help entice potential buyers. Here, she has traded her androgynous alien qualities for an exhaustion at just how hard the life of a woman on Earth can be. Many viewers first became acquainted with the actor through her intense, haunted performances in Minority Report and In America. It’s a tragic decision, and one whose complexity Morton sells brilliantly. And yet as Margaret seeks to raise much-needed capital, she eventually finds herself forced to sell off the virginity of Charlotte’s younger sister Lucy (Eloise Smyth). Her trade tends toward the rougher-edged, with one glittering exception–her daughter Charlotte ( Downton Abbey‘s Jessica Brown Findlay), who is sought after by London’s wealthy patrons. Margaret’s style, by contrast, is more saloon than salon.
The pair share little aside from enmity: Lydia teaches her working girls French and pockets their money, celebrating the finer things in life while profiting from the prurient. And their rivalry provides the engine for a compelling drama. Two rival madams, Samantha Morton’s earthy Margaret Wells and Lesley Manville’s pretentious Lydia Quigley, sit atop this world. If anything, this figure seems low once the show plunges viewers into a world so relentlessly focused on the flesh trade that it’s a wonder Georgian London had any other industries at all. In 1763 London, the opening sequence of Hulu’s new series Harlots informs us, 1 in 5 women is a sex worker.
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