I watched season one of the BBC series The Paradise on Netflix. It is set in 1875 and it is excellent.
SPOILER ALERT: Season two, however, went off the rails with an absurd feminist plotline. The female protagonist, Denise Lovett, breaks up with her fiance when he calls her his “most prized possession.” She objects to being called his possession and ends their relationship.
What sane woman would do such a thing today let alone in 1876?
In the final episode, he wins the department store in a dice game and gives it to her and walks away. She goes off and gets a male investor so she can open her own beauty shop instead. She then tells her ex-fiance, when I make my name and my fortune, will you marry me?
What sane woman would do such a thing today let alone in 1876?
There’s also a ridiculous plotline of a black photographer who’s portrayed as all-wise and all-knowing. He has a fling with a white shopgirl. There were very few blacks in 19th Century England and they weren’t operating their independent photography businesses and romancing white women. In this TV show, the characters pay no attention to the guy’s blackness and he’s black as sin. In real life England up through the 1970s, the presence of a black man was a very big deal.
