The week in TV: The Essex Serpent; the Baftas; Fergal Keane: Living With PTSD; Clark
15.05.2022 - 18:01
/ msn.com
The Essex Serpent Apple TV+The British Academy Television Awards (BBC One) | iPlayerFergal Keane: Living With PTSD (BBC Two) | iPlayerClark NetflixThere comes a time in every actor’s life when he must unbutton his period drama shirt and smoulder as if his life depends on it. In Apple TV+’s new six-parter The Essex Serpent, based on the historical novel by Sarah Perry, adapted by Anna Symon, directed by Clio Barnard, this duty falls to Tom Hiddleston, but he rather fluffs it.
Hiddleston plays a late-19th-century pastor trying to soothe marsh-dwelling locals who believe they are being menaced by a giant mythical sea serpent (think the Loch Ness monster, but with Godzilla’s temper). Claire Danes plays English widow and naturalist Cora, who, freed of her abusive husband, takes her autistic child and socialist servant (Hayley Squires) to investigate the creature.
Once in Essex – spoiler alert! – Cora is drawn into an anguished love triangle with Hiddleston’s man of the cloth and his ailing wife (Clémence Poésy). While Danes is suitably impassioned, Hiddleston clearly didn’t get the sexy-religious-dude memoIn 1988, Ken Russell’s Lair of the White Worm wove a similar tale in the spirit of mythic campery.
By contrast, The Essex Serpent is ambitiously gothic, coiling itself around a series of personal, mystical and ideological standoffs: principle versus emotion, faith versus rationalism, superstition versus science. Cora emerges as a proto-feminist with startling tangerine-hued hair (reminiscent of Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth I) and wonderfully dramatic clothes that echo the atmospheric Essex wetlands.
These are conveyed in a series of misty aerial shots featuring cawing gulls and slabs of sodden mud. A recurring criticism of
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