Sophie Rundle, Naomi Battrick and Niamh Walsh play the first consignment of women landed at Jamestown in 1619, traded as wives to the tobacco farmers who prepaid their Atlantic passage. Over three series and twenty-four episodes the settlement’s power struggles play out between Jason Flemyng’s Governor Yeardley, Burn Gorman’s conniving Company Secretary and Battrick’s wily merchant’s daughter, while indentured Angolans Abubakar Salim and Abiola Ogunbiyi arrive in the second run to expose the colony’s dependence on enslaved labour. Bill Gallagher’s scripts keep the soap bubbling: witchcraft accusations, secret Catholic printing presses, inter-tribal Powhatan politics and enough bedroom farce to fill a tavern.
Filmed largely on the dusty plains of Vértesacsa, Hungary, the show swaps documentary grit for brightly lit melodrama, letting muskets, bodices and mud serve as shorthand for historical hardship. Carnival Films, fresh from Downton Abbey, banked on the same formula of class tension and forbidden desire; Sky One renewed the drama before the first episode aired, then again before series two finished, only to call time after the third run broadcast in summer 2019. The result is a romp that never pretends to be a thesis on colonialism, preferring cliff-hangers to moral reckonings and giving its heroines the last word in every saloon stand-off.
Production Details
Sky One / 3 Seasons / 24 Episodes / 2017
Created by: Bill Gallagher
Writer(s): Bill Gallagher
Producer(s): Sue de Beauvoir
Main Cast
Sophie Rundle as Alice Kett
Niamh Walsh as Verity Bridges
Naomi Battrick as Jocelyn Woodbryg
Gwilym Lee as Samuel Castell
Stuart Martin as Silas Sharrow
Matt Stokoe as James Read
Burn Gorman as Nicholas Farlow
Jason Flemyng as Sir George Yeardley
Patsy Ferran as Mercy
Dean Lennox Kelly as Meredith Rutter
Max Beesley as Henry Sharrow
Claire Cox as Temperance Yeardley
