A fresh view on oldest profession with ‘Harlots,’ new on Hulu

“It’s 1763. London is booming, and one in five women makes a living selling sex.”

The opening words of Hulu’s new series, “Harlots,” are there to make it clear that this is one British television drama that won’t be sipping tea in the drawing room. Nor will it be passing judgment on the many working girls proffering their wares in a decidedly different kind of a room. (Or not even in a room.)

But while the intro may be time- and place-specific it could be referring to the medium as much as the message. The only place with a higher percentage of prostitutes than old London, it seems, is television.

From “Gunsmoke’s” Miss Kitty to the nameless naked women in every other episode of “Game of Thrones,” call girls — hookers, courtesans, painted ladies, saloon girls, street walkers, strumpets, whores, concubines and harlots — have been dependable mainstays, sidekicks and props in shows for and about men (i.e. many prime-time dramas).

While the details of their jobs have become more explicit over the years — the saloon girls of “Bonanza” never seemed to leave that bar, but decades later, “Deadwood” couldn’t get them out of those brass beds upstairs — their representation as characters of substance has not.

Beyond the robotic sex machines of “Westworld,” try coming up with five names of famous TV prostitutes the same way you can cowboys, cops or criminal masterminds. (And no, Huggy Bear of “Starsky & Hutch” doesn’t count.)

Faceless as they are, television’s ladies for hire have certainly multiplied. If you were to judge the female population based off their representation in the last decade’s programming alone, it would appear more like four out of five women sell sex for money, and they all happen to look like swimsuit models — just without the swimsuit.

With “Harlots,” television’s favorite wallpaper now has its own show.

The Hulu series, which premieres Wednesday, doesn’t just visit the brothel, it lives there among the women of London’s 18th century sex trade. It’s their perspective that drives the narrative and, it turns out, prostitution looks a lot different through the eyes of a woman in the business.

“Harlots” is a frank depiction of women forced into the profession by poverty, class or birth but not an entirely desperate one. The sex scenes here are neither titillating nor horrifying, gratuitously explicit or unnecessarily judgmental. They are simply a function of the job.

The women’s lives beyond these paid transactions is where the real story is.

Created by Moira Buffini and Alison Newman, the show’s team of producers, directors and writers is largely female, which partly explains why “Harlots” is a fresh look at an age-old profession — and television trope.

The casting of Jessica Brown Findlay (formerly the feisty Lady Sybil of “Downton Abbey”) as the steely-eyed, calculating survivor Charlotte is a statement in itself. She moves among the powdered-wig upper crust with the confidence of a professional woman, which in contrast to the limited roles for ladies of that era, is empowering.

But “Harlots” is not a feminist proclamation that recasts the sex trade as something noble. It’s a series in which the prostitutes are treated by the show’s writers with the same levels of humanity and importance as the men who’ve historically used and defined them.