FX’s Taboo Is Basically Bizarro World Jane Austen

The FX show Taboo, a gritty historical drama starring Tom Hardy, is set in London during the Regency era, a period best known today as a popular setting for romance novels. Fantasy author Carrie Vaughn says that historical angle is what first attracted her to the show.

“It’s set in the same time period as Jane Austen stories are,” Vaughn says in Episode 256 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I love the idea of this mirror universe Jane Austen. All of these characters could be in a Jane Austen story, except the mood would be very, very different.”

Different is right. Austen novels are largely set in sunny backyards and drawing rooms, whereas Taboo’s London is a blasted hellscape of mud and feces beneath a perpetually cloudy sky. And while Austen’s novels are full of awkward gentlemen and charming cads, Tom Hardy’s character James Delaney is something else entirely—a mentally unstable zealot who speaks mostly in grunts and growls and who practices both black magic and cannibalism.

“This is a man who’s just been totally damaged beyond repair by imperialism, and by the things that he’s been asked to do in the service of expanding British power and wealth,” says fantasy author Sam J. Miller. “He’s trying to bring down something that’s terrible, but he’s pretty terrible himself.”

Another big difference is that while Austen focuses on the hopes and dreams of her female characters, Taboo is pretty much a boy’s story, with the female characters largely relegated to the background. That’s a shame because the female leads, played by Oona Chaplin, Jessie Buckley, and Franka Potente, are potentially very interesting. “TV knows how to make good female characters, it just doesn’t give them anything to do after it puts them on the screen, and it gets frustrating,” Vaughn says.

Taboo is certainly a flawed show. Character motivations can be dubious or nonexistent, many of the plot arcs go nowhere, and the way the show consistently links creepy magic with people of color is uncomfortable. But Taboo also has amazing performances, visual flair, and a unique take on a fascinating historical period.

“Not everyone gets really excited about a really dark, atmospheric piece,” says fantasy author Erin Lindsey, “but if you do, and you want something immersive, this is definitely worth checking out.”

Listen to our complete interview with Carrie Vaughn, Sam J. Miller, and Erin Lindsey in Episode 256 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Erin Lindsey on Tom Hardy:

“I did watch [Taboo], after a while, with the closed captioning on, but not because of the accents. Maybe it’s just the sound quality on my speaker system, but I found—because Tom Hardy delivers almost all of his lines in various grunts and growls—that a lot of them I just found too muddy to hear. There were moments when that was a little bit over the top.”

Carrie Vaughn on the magic of Taboo:

“It’s this vague kind of African voodoo that we don’t really know anything about, and it seems to be problematic to me. He gets his perception of his supernatural powers from two different sources: his time in Africa, and the other thing is we find out his mother was from the Salish tribe in the Pacific Northwest—of Native Americans—and he’s got some spiritual heritage from there as well. So it’s once again this age-old story of bringing back these spiritual elements from the colonies and removing them from their context, so that’s an aspect of the way that the show handles these colonial issues that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. I think the show’s heart was in the right place, but it relied on some of these tropes I think a little too much.”

Sam J. Miller on history:

“[Taboo] is part of this trend of ‘genocide revenge’ narratives that we’ve seen a few examples of. The most significant ones I think are Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds, where it’s not historically accurate, but it’s like, ‘Let’s go and kill the [people] who did all this terrible stuff.’ And I actually had a problem with both of those movies, because as much as I love to see Nazis die, and as much as I want to see Hitler get shot in the face, I feel like, even when you know they’re not historically accurate, it provides the kind of emotional catharsis that enables us to walk out of the theater thinking, ‘Oh whew, glad that’s settled,’ and sort of fails to leave us with the troubling, really problematic legacies of both slavery and the Holocaust, and the ways in which the ends of those oppressive periods didn’t result in complete justice.”

Erin Lindsey on mystery:

“One of the things that I think makes the show work so well is precisely this element of mystery, but I do wonder how you sustain that, and it’s very hard with mystery. If you withhold too much, it becomes very frustrating. I think the fact that we get the plot in dribs and drabs works very well, particularly getting the backstory in dribs and drabs over the course of the season works very well, but I don’t know how long you can sustain that type of approach without it becoming frustrating. At a certain point we have to understand a character enough—we have to understand their motivations, we have to understand their capabilities, we have to understand their goals. And right now I don’t feel like I have a handle on any of that with James Delaney.”



[WIRED]