My Lady Jane – Prime Video’s awkward anti-Bridgerton :-)

While watching the first four episodes of My Lady Jane (I haven’t seen them all and I don’t intend to, please don’t force me), I couldn’t help but imagine the upper echelons of Prime Video in the throes of heartbreak over the success of Bridgerton are Netflix.
How is it possible, they may have asked themselves, that so many people start watching this sugary shit? But above all, why don’t we have it?

I see no other possible reason to produce My Lady Janewhich will also have its literary origins (from Cynthia Hand’s novel), but whose television nature as “anti-Bridgerton” is more obvious than ever: another series set in an English historical context appropriately updated and revisited without too much respect for History and much for inclusiveness, in which we talk about love, court intrigues and various gossip, with protagonists young girls eager for independence and social redemption, all told with a light, explicitly pop tone, with a robust dose of prurience.

Then of course, My Lady Jane it also adds the fantasy load, but at that point it’s all worth it.
Well, no, not everything is worth it, because intentions are one thing, and the final result is another.

My Lady Janecreated by Gemma Burgess (herself a literary author of “new adult” novels, which are basically Young Adult but not so young) tells a precise moment in English history, but with an important twist (or rather two).

We are more or less in the mid-sixteenth century, and on the throne of England sits Edward VI, the only male child of Henry VIII, the very famous Tudor sovereign who, for his amorous and marital desires (do you remember Anne Boleyn and all that business?) gave birth to a real religious schism, founding the Anglican Church in open polemic with the Catholic papacy of Rome.
If we look at the facts, Edward was a boy who died very early, and was succeeded, after a certain number of palace maneuvers, by his cousin Jane Grey, who however remained queen for a few days, to then be dethroned and killed by Edward’s older sister, Mary, who would later go down in history as Bloody Mary (the Bloody Mary of drinks). After Mary it would be the turn of her sister Elizabeth (i.e. Elizabeth I, the one in the films with Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett), after which the Tudor dynasty would definitively become extinct.

Well, My Lady Jane inserts itself into this well-coded story, to distort a fundamental point: Jane Grey actually ascends to the throne after the death of her cousin Edward, but is not killed after days. A bit of a classic “what if”.

Let’s say right away, however, that we are talking about a what if far from being a rigorously analyzed historical hypothesis. On the contrary: the figure of Jane Grey, who became queen at seventeen, becomes the pretext to tell a story of rebellious adolescence, of the contrast between dreams of independence and family and institutional responsibilities, and obviously of overwhelming first loves.

But not only that. The fantasy twist is still missing which, more than what ifsounds like a what the fuck. If in reality the fierce clash within the royal family was between Catholics and Anglicans, with Mary wanting to overturn her father’s schism to bring the kingdom back to Catholicism (without however succeeding) and not disdaining murders and summary executions, in My Lady Jane all this religious tension vanishes, replaced by something similar in dynamics, but radically different in practice: in the world of the series, in fact, alongside traditional human beings there are the so-called “ethians”, who are basically shape-shifters, people who, on command, they can transform into a specific animal.

In this context, Mary is still the bad one, the “bloody one”, but not because she is a Catholic who has a grudge against heretics, but rather a racist who wants the extermination of the Ethian minority.

In recent years, that of historical revisitations, of reinterpretations of what has already been experienced, of visions of the past filtered through the categories of the present, is becoming an artistic theme which is evidently very intertwined with political and cultural claims which have nothing to do only with television series.

The famous (or infamous) inclusiveness, which initially referred “only” to a greater representation, in front of and behind the screen, of minorities who until then had been relegated to marginal and/or too stereotyped roles, has then expanded to include more extreme, in some ways iconoclastic reflections and incarnations, which become particularly visible in historical stories: the underlying idea is that if History (with a capital H) has been unjust, fiction has in its nature the ability to right certain wrongs, precisely because, being fiction, it can technically do what it wants.

Bridgertonwhich debuted at Christmas 2020, represented one of the first and most visible examples of this discourse, with a story set during the English Regency in which the quota of black characters present (and well integrated) within society was much higher than the historical reality to which the series referred. A choice that Bridgerton he always tried to explain in terms of what ifbut without even too much effort: the concept, simply, was “we tell this story here, with these characters here, and if you don’t like it you can watch something else”.

The operation of Bridgertonjust to be clear, it was completely legitimate, just as legitimate is that of My Lady Janeincluding magical shapeshifters. And that’s because, quite simply, in fiction you can do anything, otherwise it wouldn’t be called fiction.
Naturally, however, this underlying legitimacy, almost axiomatic, has nothing to do with the actual performance of the product, with its success or failure with the public, with its ability to be exciting, original and so on.

From this point of view, and while trying to keep an open mind as much as possible as the times require, it is difficult not to see in My Lady Jane a bungled bungler who struggles to entertain and who seems to stumble even over his most political and inclusive messages, which might already seem excessive in a story that presents itself as pure entertainment, but if they also turn out to be inconsistent…

About the fact that My Lady Jane whether entertaining or not, in the most general sense of the term, is of course a very subjective question, which also depends on the target audience you belong to. It is quite clear that the series does not speak to me, a straight male over forty who tends to like action and science fiction more than gossip and thwarted love affairs.

At the same time, My Lady Jane doesn’t seem to have anything fresh or innovative to offer in the genre. The protagonist longs for independence in a world of arranged marriages, the rigid mother who doesn’t give a damn about her daughter’s feelings, some very bad characters who will practically never have a chance of redemption, and an explicitly difficult and thwarted love story, are just some of the classic ingredients of a series that, despite wanting to be “destructive” with respect to a certain way of telling the story, is actually inserted without too much effort into a pop-gossip genre that we have already seen many times.

Nor does it seem capable of offering dialogues, twists and acting of a particularly high level: sheltering behind an explicitly comedic approach that justifies a marked recognizability of the roles, My Lady Jane proposes characters cut with an ax and characterized by one or two qualities that continually return, and which become fuel for the most classic conflicts of the genre. But if the entertainment is all and only in the small arguments, in the hormonal battles, and in a generic crazy setting with a very loaded acting, bordering on parody, in short, I struggle.

And then there is the more political and cultural question, in which Lady Jane he tries to place some “mandatory” flags, but in the end they struggle to find their own organicity, especially in a context where the product actually has to be sold.

It’s not just that Edward is older and much blacker than his real counterpart. Then of course, the fact that the paintings show us his father Henry VIII white, and that he has two sisters, one completely white and the other halfway, make the whole thing almost grotesque: if the goal is to tell us that we shouldn’t even look at skin color, otherwise we’re racist, we have to respond that in addition to historical coherence there is also another, much more important, which is the one internal to the story. And if a brother and two sisters have three completely different ethnic groups, also different from historical reality, you have to give me a minimum of justification, otherwise I don’t perceive the story, but only the famous little flags.

But there is a much more relevant problem that concerns the protagonist Jane herself (played by Emily Bader). Wanting to write the perfect feminist heroine, one who seeks independence and freedom against patriarchal power, should not necessarily end up with a character who is mostly hateful, one-dimensional, very redundant in always repeating the same concepts. And if we can overlook the fact that it seems there cannot exist a feminist heroine who does not deny love as such, it is certainly stranger to see a series that has this modern and inclusive approach, and in which our Jane then falls in love with the first handsome little jerk (played by Edward Bluemel) who makes her lower belly tingle.

It is in these details that the contrast between the inclusive, provocative and disruptive intention (I repeat, intention) and the concreteness of a screenplay which then has to sell itself to an audience of boys and (above all I would say) girls who have been trembling for time immemorial becomes clear. always for the same things, first of all a hormonal falling in love in which one’s attention is given only to the wrong people (with the idea that one will be able to make them right), regardless of all the good intentions of the day before.

The result is a series that believes itself to be super sparkling and innovative, but which is not from the point of view of the basic structure, it is not in the inclusive exaggeration that had already been started by Bridgerton and that here simply overflows beyond any reasonable boundary, and ultimately it is not even in the implementation of a fantasy element that, all things considered, sounds less interesting than what really happened in History: perhaps it was precisely the reality of religious conflicts that was considered too scabrous and delicate for today’s audiences.

I do not exclude the possibility that there is a segment of the public, one of which I am not part for many personal and biological reasons, who may appreciate the proposal of My Lady Janebut I don’t think we’re dealing with something that will leave a particular mark. More generally, even in these times when everything seems to be worth it, I’d like to be able to keep the possibility of watching a series like this and let out a simple, instinctive, affectionate: what the hell is this bullshit?

Why Follow My Lady Jane: if you like it a lot Bridgertonyou might like at least in part even its stupidest and most confusing copy.
Why give up My Lady Jane: the devastation it makes of history is not adequately compensated by a creative or entertaining enough script.