The Rise of Wonky Costume Dramas Is Getting Weird - Reactor

I never thought this would be an issue for me, I really didn’t. As someone who first fell in love with costume dramas watching A Little Princess as a child (the original with Shirley Temple, and also the ’90s remake), who graduated to swooning over Colin Firth in the BBC Pride and Prejudice mini series (no disrespect to Kiera Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, but the film just didn’t hit the same), if you put actors in period dress in front of a camera, I am almost always there for it. But lately, even as I keep watching, I sense a kind of uneasiness creep over me.

It’s not that I didn’t wholeheartedly enjoy the most recent season of Bridgerton. I did; in all honesty, it felt like a return to form after a lackluster previous season. I also enjoyed The Favourite, as well as the BBC version of The Pursuit of Love, and I even gave The Great some time before it was cancelled. And it’s not that I can reasonably expect everyone to be as aware of anachronisms in a given costume drama as I am; after all, I’m a historian. It’s quite literally my job to care more about these things than the average person.

It’s more that anachronism is one thing, in and of itself. When all the anachronisms are of the same flavor, something inside me twitches. And if the return of The Artful Dodger to television, coupled with the anxiety I’m feeling about the upcoming Sense and Sensibility adaptation (after Netflix’s butchering of Persuasion, I fear no Austen is safe) are anything to go by, something weird is afoot.

While it’s hard to put an exact name and shape to the phenomenon I’m describing, it’s definitely something where you Know It When You See It. When Enola Holmes (now inexplicably slated for a third installment), The Pursuit of Love, and (shudder with me now) Persuasion all feel as if they could be part of a shared cinematic universe, despite being set decades apart and allegedly belonging to different genres, you know that something is up.

These self-consciously playful, colorful, never-taking-themselves-entirely-seriously adaptations can be fun, when done well. And they serve a purpose, beyond the fluffy delights of string quartets playing Olivia Rodrigo while sauciness ensues in a staircase. They send a message; “people in the past: they were like us!”

And yet. That message starts to lose its power when there seems to be only one definition of “us” available. Watching some of these costume dramas, I wonder who exactly they’re for. They’re probably not meant for me, a historian; but I don’t think they’re made for a generic “not a historian” population. They’re made, seemingly, for a market-researched demographic. At their worst, they’re the equivalent of romance novels that list the tropes they contain on the back cover, seemingly begging the reader to discuss them on BookTok.

And say what you will about the commodification aspect at play here, that kind of narrowing also stymies much of the mission of anachronistic adaptations before the show or the film even starts. If you, the viewer, are not the kind of irreverent, post-ironic soul who uses the word “girlypop” in casual conversation, this isn’t relatable. It’s just two alien ways of being, one overlaid atop the other.

But, well, there’s something else that can’t be fully ignored. People in the past weren’t “just like us.” They were still people, yes, who laughed and cried and hoped and feared and fought and loved. But they were different from us, in ways both great and small. 

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote L. P. Hartley. I first encountered this quote as an opening to a period drama; the sweeping Australian multigenerational melodrama, A Place to Call Home. The quote, though, is from the beginning of The Go-Between, a novel about a teenage boy’s disillusionment with the human suffering caused by rigid late Victorian social norms. Hartley published the book, which is told in flashback, in the middle of the twentieth century, and his own past of 1953 would seem a world away to us today were we to visit.

While period dramas don’t have to be history lessons, surely there should be some point in setting them in the past. Yes, “those lovely costumes” does count as a point, but not the only one. Whether or not you want to expose the past, or celebrate it, or even change it in the newly-ascendant Bridgerton tradition, using historical settings is a choice. Experimenting with and altering those settings is a choice too. And there should be a reason to make these choices.

At its best, anachronism in period dramas can serve to bring something fundamentally alien to an audience in language they understand. Sofia Coppola’s famous soundtrack choices in Marie Antoinette helped underscore the surreal combination of indulgence, pleasure, boredom, and loneliness at the heart of Louis XVI’s court. Though silly, the audience of peasants doing the wave in A Knight’s Tale made the bizarre-to-modern-eyes sport of jousting feel like something to sincerely get excited about.

On the other hand, Anne Elliot skulking around a window ledge with a bottle of wine complaining that she and Captain Wentworth are “exes” doesn’t make a foreign concept comprehensible; it takes a feeling that the audience might not immediately understand (the mourning that comes from breaking off a relationship that never had a chance to become physically, or to an extent, emotionally, intimate, for social reasons that don’t exist in the twenty-first century) and replaces it wholesale. When Dickinson takes Emily Dickinson, who was both famously reclusive and, during her lifetime, displayed minimal interest in publishing her work, and makes her a quasi-suffragette who declares that it’s her “purpose” to “be a great writer,” they’re taking a fascinating artist who really lived and swapping her memory for a story we’ve all already heard.

Even when there is some genuine fun to be had with the finished product, like in The Buccaneers, it’s hard not to look at the fluffy romance and a protagonist who worries about if she’s “supposed to be the main character,” and not miss what could have been. In the case of The Buccaneers, that’s both Edith Wharton’s sardonic eye, and the hard-nosed ferocity of the real “dollar princesses,” whose lives were stories that are unromantic in the “hearts and flowers” sense, but heaped with intrigue worthy of the Tudors (though probably not sexy enough for The Tudors, which at least had the courage to present its anachronisms and inaccuracies as straightforward titillation). When we try to flatten our adaptations of history into a single modern subculture’s worldview, so much is, and inevitably will be, lost. And for what, exactly? Who is really still falling in love with what feels like an increasingly formulaic way of making these? Who is making these things, and what, if anything, do they want them to mean? Who, well, cares?

Perhaps that’s where the line is drawn. While The Favourite may have been one of the earliest of this new, sly breed of period drama, and it may have spawned imitators and homages (The Great in particular was fun, but for Tony McNamara, scriptwriter on both projects, a shameless retread of already well-explored territory), it had one standout element that, say, Rosaline or even House of Guinness just doesn’t, at least to my mind: it took its subjects, and the story it wanted to tell, seriously. That’s why it worked where others that followed don’t.

This doesn’t mean that the movies and shows themselves have to be serious; I did, after all, praise A Knight’s Tale a few paragraphs up. But history carries weight, and stories have power. What we tell matters, but so does how we tell it. By all means, have a little fun with the history books, and take your creative liberties—but only if you really mean what you’re saying.