Summary
Historical fiction shows give you the best of all possible worlds. They’re based in fact, so you feel like you’re learning something while you watch, but they also hone in on the most interesting parts of history, which can be as exciting as any action film.
One of the best historical fiction series of the 21st century is The Last Kingdom, a medieval epic about the bloody, formative years of England. The Last Kingdom has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 91%, which is very impressive, but there’s one Netflix series that beats it.
Alias Grace is a quietly compelling historical fiction show
Based on a book by one of the greatest living authors
Alias Grace is based on a book of the same name by Margaret Atwood, the author behind books like The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. While Atwood is known for writing fiction with a genre edge — The Handmaid’s Tale, her most famous work, is set in an alternate reality where the United States is taken over by a theocratic dictatorship — Alias Grace is about an actual woman named Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon), who was convicted of the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear, her employer (Paul Gross), and of Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper (Anna Paquin), in Ontario, Canada.
Grace is an Irish immigrant who takes a job as a maid when she’s still a teenager. Like the best historical fiction shows, Alias Grace excels at engrossing us in the time period. Nineteenth century Canada is recreated with loving detail, from the costumes to the sets to, importantly, the social mores of the time.
We pick up with Grace in jail, when she’s interviewed by Dr. Simon Jordan (Edward Holcroft), a handsome psychologist brought in to try and prove Grace’s innocence. Grace tells Simon her life story, which is where the show gets really interesting.
It’s hard to tell what’s true on Alias Grace
But trying to figure it out is fascinating
Grace’s story begins predictably enough: she talks about the difficult crossing from Ireland to Canada, suffering abuse at the hands of her father, and securing work. But as the show goes on, there’s reason to doubt her honestly and maybe even her sanity.
To start, Grace is a famous “murderess” whose story has already been filtered through the eyes of many other parties. The press has disparaged her, her lawyer altered her story, and the doctors at the asylum where she spent time ignored her version of events and put her through inhuman tests. She loses her mother early in life, and is separated from her siblings. Even Dr. Simon starts seeing Grace in a distorted way as he begins to fantasize about her. Is it possible to find the real Grace under all this trauma, grief, fear, lust, and rumor?
The show doesn’t give us easy answers. Instead, it asks tough questions about the fallibility of memory, the haziness of history, and whether men can ever see women without projecting their own desires onto them.
At the center of it all is Sarah Gadon remarkable performance as Grace. Is Grace a traumatized amnesiac? A Machiavellian mastermind? Something in between? Gadon’s performance makes Grace sympathetic, but it’s so subtle that it never gives anything away for sure. Like the other characters, viewers will have different opinions about what really happened, and what Grace deserves.
Alias Grace is a slow-burning show that builds into something much more than the sum of its parts. At only six episodes, it’s a fairly quick watch, but every minute counts.
Alias Grace deserves its accolades
And unlike The Last Kingdom, it’ll stick around Netflix
Obviously, The Last Kingdom and Alias Grace are very different kinds of historical fiction dramas. One is set in the ninth century in England, the other in the nineteenth century in Canada. The Last Kingdom is an action show that sometimes feels like it has more in common with fantasy dramas like Game of Thrones than actual history, while Alias Grace is an internal character journey that comes alive in the pauses and the things left unsaid. They’re two sides of the same coin, and both worth watching.
That said, you may want to watch one before the other. The Last Kingdom is currently streaming on Netflix, but is leaving later this year, whereas Alias Grace will be on there for the long haul.
The Margaret Atwood renaissance
Alias Grace dropped on Netflix in 2017, the same year that Hulu debuted its adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood had been writing since the 1960s, and it was exciting to see some of her most famous works make it onto the screen.
Things have stalled a bit since then. HBO was working on adapting Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, a sci-fi story set in a bleak, dystopian world, but it never happened. We have yet to get adaptations of other great Atwood books like The Blind Assassin. But thanks to shows like Alias Grace, that first wave is almost enough by itself.
- Release Date
- 2017 - 2017-00-00
- Network
- CBC Television
- Directors
- Mary Harron