Think the Kardashians keep the gossip rags in business? Allow us to introduce you to the Mitford sisters.
The real-life siblings at the center of BritBox‘s new series Outrageous made for scandalous headlines in 1930s England, with the sisters’ personal and political exploits a national obsession for the better part of the decade. The fictionalized drama based on Mary S. Lovell’s biography The Mitford Girls, which premieres with two episodes on the streaming service today, offers an inside look at the real stories behind the society-page scandals.
“One of my sisters would become the most hated woman in Britain,” series narrator Nancy Mitford (played by Bridgerton‘s Bessie Carter) informs us in Episode 1. “But I’m getting ahead of myself.”
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As a matter of fact, so are we. Read on as we recap the new show’s first two episodes and introduce you to its key players, augmented by our recent conversations with series stars Carter, Joanna Vanderham (Warrior), Shannon Watson (BBC One’s The Jetty) and Zoe Brough (BBC One’s Casualty).
NANCY MITFORD
Nancy, who would go on to become a well-known novelist, is the first Mitford we hear from; her wry take on her family brings viewers into the action. As the various Mitford siblings cavort on their family’s Oxfordshire estate — which they’ve dubbed “The Fortress” — we learn that she’s the eldest child, followed by Pam (played by The Serpent Queen‘s Isabel Jesper Jones), only son Tom (Reign‘s Toby Regbo), Diana (Vanderham), Unity (Watson), Jessica (Brough) and Deborah (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder‘s Orla Hill).
As we come into the story, Nancy is unofficially engaged to a man named Hamish; she seems to be the only person unaware that he’s gay. When he tells her that he must leave the country, effectively ending their relationship, she’s crushed. “Here I am, living at home, penniless, and still a virgin at 28,” she says to her friend, Joss, self-deprecatingly bemoaning her fate.
(About the “penniless” part: Though the Mitford family was part of the aristocracy, the series lets us know that parents David (The Following‘s James Purefoy) and Sydney (Pennyworth‘s Anna Chancellor) are hurting financially by the 1930s, and things don’t get much sunnier as the episodes move along.)
Even after Tom flat-out informs his sister that “Hamish prefers men” — which he knows firsthand — Nancy continues to hope. And when Hamish suddenly returns to England and seeks her out, she’s sure a proposal is forthcoming. Instead, though, he lets her know that he’s engaged to someone else. Hurt and angry, she agrees to a tossed-off proposal from Peter Rood, a dashing man she meets at a bar. They sleep together —an unsatisfying experience for her —and marry by the end of Episode 2, despite all evidence that he’s feckless and kind of a jerk.
Nancy is one of the show’s smartest and funniest characters, so her inability to correctly read the room —romantically speaking — is heartbreaking. “I remember thinking this quite early on, reading her scripts,” Carter says. “I think most people who are seemingly confident, funny and intelligent sometimes have such low self-worth, because they’ve sort of built up ‘Oh, I’ve got to be funny because maybe I’m not a good looking as my sister with blue eyes.’ I think she has deep insecurities. She was just really vulnerable at heart and so just went toward whoever would sort of give her a feeling of being loved or looked at. And that can scupper your red flag-dar.”
DIANA MITFORD
When we first meet Diana, she’s a beautiful, bored mother who bemoans her husband’s lack of purpose. By the end of Episode 2, she has scandalized the Mitfords’ social set by leaving her husband and entering an affair with Oswald Mosley, the married leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Diana was “the socialite of the time, and everyone was wanting to know her and photograph her,” Vanderham says of her character. “What was really interesting to me was how someone who is so charming and clearly adored by so many people can have these pretty radical political viewpoints. For me, the most exciting part of the show is that we delve into why she starts to think that way… It’s her association with Mosley that sets her on that path.”
UNITY MITFORD
Unity’s formal entrance into society, via a debutante ball, is the focal point of Episode 1. But the young woman is more interested in sneaking her pet rat into the soiree (via her handbag, of course) and goofing around with her younger sister, Jessica, than she is in curtsies and aristocratic matchmaking. A protest outside the ball, however, draws Unity’s attention to the growing fascist movement in England.
The ideas that Mosley is espousing in England —and Adolf Hitler in Germany —light a fire inside Unity. When Episode 2 starts, she’s performing Hitler Youth calisthenics on the grounds of the Mitford estate. Later on, Unity and Diana attend a Nazi rally in Nuremberg, Germany, where they are enchanted by everything they see and hear.
In conversation, Watson and Vanderham are very clear that their characters were on the wrong side of history. Watson points out that many members of the Mitford family were fascist sympathizers, so “they grew up in a family where it was already being talked about.” Add in the fact that the girls weren’t allowed to go to school, and grew up in a home where “not much was going on,” Vanderham says, “I think they just kind of got quite bored”— and political causes at first seemed like romantic, interesting ways to differentiate themselves.
“There was one comment that David Pryce-Jones, the biographer of Unity, said,” Watson says. “It was saying how Unity was the type of person, from all his research, that if she became religious, she would have been fanatical about religion. So yeah, it was inevitable.”
JESSICA MITFORD
Just as the protest outside Unity’s coming-out ball piqued Unity’s interest in fascism, it sparked Jessica’s curiosity about communism. Though Jessica’s storyline doesn’t get a ton of screen time in the show’s first two episodes, it picks up as the season continues. And the depth of detail comes straight from the sisters themselves, who penned massive amounts of letters to each other.
Brough recalls talking with Sarah Williams (Flesh and Blood, Becoming Jane), who wrote the series, about what wasn’t said in those letters, as well. “She was saying to me yesterday that there is a lot of writing about the sisters, but they themselves don’t often write down how they felt. They were very British about that, you know?” She laughs. “So that’s where Sarah felt like she could step in. That was what she was able to bring to this story: Yes, we know the facts, but how did they feel about them?”
Outrageous‘ six-episode first season will continue with new episodes streaming Thursdays. Grade the premiere via the poll below, then hit the comments with your thoughts!
