Gentleman Jack is a historical drama television series
created by Sally Wainwright.Set in the year 1832 in Yorkshire, it stars Suranne
Jones as landowner and industrialist Anne Lister. The series is based on the
collected diaries of Lister, which contain over four million words and are
written largely in secret code, documenting a lifetime of lesbian
relationships.
Gentleman Jack is a BBC One and HBO co-production. The
series premiered on 22 April 2019 in the United States, and in the United
Kingdom on 19 May 2019. It was renewed for a second season by BBC One on 23 May
2019.
Set in 1832, the brilliant, endearing Miss Anne Lister
leaves Paris brokenhearted and heads to the lush landscape of Halifax, West
Yorkshire, England to restore her uncle's estate which she has inherited. This
newly instated, androgynous and unusual lady landowner and landlord, encounters
a potentially blossoming and dangerous romance with the fairer sex, which she
records in a cryptic diary that no-one can decode.
In November 2016, screenwriter Sally Wainwright was awarded
the £30,000 screenwriting fellowship grant from the charitable organisation the
Wellcome Trust, in partnership with Film4 and the British Film Institute.[19]
Wainwright disclosed to the media that she was writing a drama series about the
landowner, industrialist, and intellectual Anne Lister and would use the grant
to further her research.[20] In March 2017, it was announced that BBC One and
American network HBO had commissioned the eight-part series, provisionally
titled "Shibden Hall", after Lister's ancestral home of the same
name.[4] Wainwright was announced as the series' director, and executive
producer together with Piers Wenger and Faith Penhale.[4] A native of
Yorkshire, Wainwright had grown up in the environs of Shibden Hall and had had
ambitions to write a drama based on Anne Lister for over 20 years.[4][21] She
described Lister as "a gift to a dramatist" and "one of the most
exuberant, thrilling and brilliant women in British history".[4]
In July 2017, the series was renamed Gentleman Jack and
Suranne Jones was announced in the protagonist role of Lister. Wainwright, who
had previously worked with Jones in Scott and Bailey and Unforgiven, deemed her
capable of embodying the "boldness, subtlety, energy and humour" required
to depict Lister. In April 2018, Sophie Rundle joined the production as Ann
Walker, Lister's intended spouse.
In November 2018, Katherine Kelly was cast in the role of
Ann Walker's sister, Elizabeth Sutherland, Sofie Gråbøl as Queen Marie of
Denmark and Tom Lewis as Thomas Sowden.
The series' ending theme song "Gentleman Jack" was
written, and is performed, by O'Hooley & Tidow. It was first released in
2012.
Location shooting took place in Yorkshire and surrounding
areas, including Shibden Hall as Anne Lister's home and Sutton Park, Yorkshire
as Ann Walker's home.
BBC One released a teaser trailer for the series on 8 March
2019, followed by the first official trailer on 18 March 2019. The first
trailer from HBO was also released on 18 March 2019.
Gentleman Jack premiered first in the US on 22 April 2019;
followed by the UK premiere on 19 May 2019. The series premiered in Australia
on Fox Showcase on 19 May 2019.
The Hollywood Reporter described Gentleman Jack as a
"funny, smart, and touching story" which at times has the main
character talk to the camera to explain her inner thoughts, allowing aspects of
Lister's diary to be used. The Guardian review said "Suranne Jones rocks
Halifax as the first modern lesbian...Anne Lister's diary [becomes] a thrilling
coal-town romp that flirts with parody, so maybe it's Queer Brontë."
Variety pointed up the drama's uniqueness: "Wainwright makes an intriguing
choice that sets up a decidedly adult romance about devotion, trust and
partnership that is rare for TV in general, let alone for lesbian characters in
a period piece."
The series tie-in paperback was released on 25 April 2019 by
BBC Books in the United Kingdom under the title Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne
Lister; and on 4 June 2019 in the United States by Penguin Random House as
Gentleman Jack: The Diaries of Anne Lister. The book is authored by Anne Choma,
who served as the historical adviser for the series.
Gentleman Jack is a true TV marvel – romantic, raw and
totally radical
The wonder of Sally Wainwright’s lesbian period drama is the
way it mixed the traditional with the groundbreaking – all while pulling in
millions of fans
Rebecca Nicholson
Mon 8 Jul 2019 13.57 BST Last modified on Mon 8 Jul 2019
13.58 BST
Like Anne Lister herself, the Gentleman Jack finale strode
its way to a happy ending with plenty of charm to spare. It galloped through
its best episode yet with enough pace to put its quick-footed heroine in the
shade. It was a shameless crowd-pleaser, and as a drama, it seemed as if the
show had found its confidence and its stride. There will be another season, and
though the marriage (of sorts) wrapped everything up in as traditional a manner
as possible, it left the impression that there are plenty of adventures to come
for the happy couple, and some of those will involve the surprisingly gripping
world of early 19th-century coal mining.
As always, Gentleman Jack balanced sly humour and subtle
pain. Lister gambolled around Copenhagen wooing aristocracy and royalty, when
she finally worked out who the queen was (if only the queen had been wearing
her Faroese jumper), even casting off her mournful black for a white and
uncharacteristically exuberant concoction. Sofie Gråbøl’s mischievous “Time you
got over it, perhaps?” burst Anne’s self-indulgently doomy bubble, and was much
needed. For most of the series, Anne has been tightly wound and driven, barely
able to relax in the company of Ann Walker. It was a joy to see her dancing so
freely at the birthday ball, embracing her role as a provocateur. Suranne Jones
has been excellent at conveying Anne’s more fractious side – poor Marian, who only
wants someone to pay attention to her – but at last we got a real sense of her
famous charisma, too.
It was a pity the Danish excursion had to end so soon, but
both Anne and Ann were being rushed towards home. Miss Walker’s miserable
Scottish confinement came to an end, with Ann presumably having had enough of
staring into the sea swathed in the contents of an Edinburgh Woollen Mill sale
basket. Sally Wainwright always writes sisters into her shows, and here, it was
a beautiful act of self-sacrifice that set Ann back on the right path.
Elizabeth (a brilliant, too-brief appearance from Katherine Kelly) realised
that her sister might never recover if her own dastardly husband married her
off to his broke and dishonest cousin and attempted to cure her mental troubles
with motherhood. Elizabeth, no doubt, will suffer the consequences, but it
allowed Ann to find her autonomy at last. As Ann finally insisted that she
would deal with Captain Sutherland, and then she did, it was a gentle and
deserved moment of defiance.
The episode was full of these delicate twists and turns. By
the time Anne and Ann were reunited, it was the seemingly weaker woman who had
found her strength, while the stronger had found humility in defeat. When Anne
howled into the air, with a scream that might come to rival Meryl Streep’s Big
Little Lies roar, it was she who was about to be rescued, not the other way
round, as it might have seemed at the start of the series. Just as we had seen
Anne liberated in Copenhagen, back in Halifax, she was fragile and vulnerable.
“Don’t hurt me. I’m not as strong as you think I am,” she said, sweetly, before
adding with predictable bluntness: “Well, I am, obviously.” Though it has been
willing to follow its heart at times, Gentleman Jack has always resisted excess
sentiment.
When the strings began to swell on that hillside kiss,
though, I found myself taking a moment to marvel that a lesbian storyline so unapologetically
romantic has been managing to pull in six million or so viewers every week, in
one of the most prestigious primetime slots on television. LGBTQ+ audiences
usually have to settle for seeing themselves as minor characters or in what
scraps of subtext they can find, and there’s a long history of gay characters
meeting premature endings (the lamentable “bury your gays” trope, which even
Wainwright fell into when she killed Kate in Last Tango in Halifax; she later
said she regretted the storyline).
What is wonderful about Gentleman Jack is how cleverly it
manages to hold contradictory ideas true at once. This is the story of two
women committing to a romantic relationship in 1832, well aware that they have
already been gossiped about and condemned, and that the full extent of their
companionship must now be kept secret from the wider world. And yet, as a
series, it is also simply a romantic period drama that just happens to have two
women at the centre. Its ending is either as traditional as it is radical, or
as radical as it is traditional. The gender of the two protagonists is both
everything and nothing. It is a complex balancing act, and Gentleman Jack has
made it look easy.
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