The renegade Derry Girl turned folk superhero conquering family TV
TRANSFORMED into an eightpart series with Disney’s unlimited budgets, Renegade Nell (Disney+) is a family-friendly romp bursting with wit and anti-authority swagger.
From Sally Wainwright, the screenwriter behind Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack, fans of Johnny Depp’s Pirates Of The Caribbean will adore it. So will anyone longing for more of Sergeant Catherine Cawood’s combination of nononsense toughness and protective loyalty to her family.
And it’s impossible not to love the sight of Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland in red britches and a tricorn hat. The script is rumbustious, without a word of foul language. There’s punchups, brawls, sword fights and shootings galore, yet no gore or gratuitous bloodiness. The attention to 18th-century period detail is magnificent, but the show wears its learning lightly.
Dubliner Harland plays Nellie, an innkeeper’s daughter who returns home after her husband is killed fighting the French at the Battle of Blenheim (that’s 1704, history boffins). On the way, she stumbles into a band of highwaymen, who relieve her of her horse, wedding ring and boots.
But when the wise-cracking leader of the gang (Frank Dillane)
whacks her across the face with his pistol, something supernatural happens. Without even understanding how she’s doing it, Nell duffs up the robbers, sending them cartwheeling through the trees and swatting away bullets with the palm of her hand.
For reasons that slowly become clear, Nell has a pixie bodyguard called Billy Blind (Nick Mohammed). Whenever her life is threatened, which does happen frequently, he becomes a whirling point of golden light, like Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell — and dives straight down her throat.
After that, as she gleefully tells her sisters, ‘I’m untouchable.’
In a pell-mell first episode, Nell finds herself accused of killing the local landowner (Pip Torrens, reprising his role as the wicked magistrate from Poldark), and on the run with her sisters Roxy and George (Bo Bragason and Florence Keen).
Before long, she’s holding up stagecoaches herself and winning hearts as a folk hero, even from the toffs she robs. As well as paying homage to traditional superhero themes, borrowed from Superman and his U.S. cohorts, Wainwright draws cleverly on English myth and literature. Nell is Dick Turpin and Jack the Giant Killer, Robin Hood and Maid Marion.
Among a terrific supporting cast, Craig Parkinson as Nell’s father, Joely Richardson, playing a newspaper owner, and Lenny Rush as a treacherous servant also stand out.
Already this year, we’ve seen some astonishing TV on streaming channels such as Netflix and AppleTV+: Guy Ritchie’s posh gangster escapade The Gentleman, megabudget sci-fi in 3 Body Problem, sweeping historical adventure with Shogun, wartime spectacle in Masters Of The Air.
While cinema is afraid to invest in anything but remakes and sequels, this new kind of television has epic ambition and the vision to match it, as well as the funds.
Winning hearts as a folk hero