Renegade Nell causes a rumpus in exhilarating fantasy adventure
n the opening minutes of Renegade Nell,
Nelly Jackson tells highwayman Isambard Tulley: “Little word of warning. You don’t want to mess with me.”
The Disney+ fantasy adventure series is the latest show from Happy Valley writer Sally Wainwright.
Nell has inadvertently stumbled on Tulley and his gang robbing a group of wealthy travellers in the woods. The date is 1705 and Nell is returning to her family tavern in Tottenham, widowed, after her husband, Captain Jack was “blasted in half at the Battle of Blenheim”,
Icreator, executive producer and writer of the first five episodes of the series, is largely considered a safe – and extraordinarily capable – pair of hands. Wainwright is most wellknown for Scott & Bailey, Last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack.
Renegade Nell sees Wainwright parry with and between genres, themes and styles for which she is less well known. The magic realism and playful spirit that frames Renegade Nell may feel worlds away from Happy Valley, but – as with Wainwright’s indomitable women characters and frequent focus on class inequalities – magic realism does have precedence in her back catalogue.
Wainwright’s reimagination of the three Brontë sisters in the BBC film To Walk Invisible (2016) included scenes of the siblings as children, their heads adorned with burning crowns of fire. Renegade Nell has a similar interest in the magical relationship between three extraordinary sisters.
The show is a magical mix of Wainwright’s previous creative expertise. Its adventure is drawn from Jane Hall (2006) and comedy from Bonkers (2007). It has period costume and a musical score reminiscent of Gentleman Jack and magic realism from To Walk Invisible. Then there’s the determination and resilience from Happy Valley, and the focus on family, care, community and class that was inherent to Wainwright’s soap opera writing for Coronation Street.
Alongside its interest in women and the inequalities they experience and battle to overcome, a theme central to Renegade Nell is social class.
With Nell as our guide, the structural inequalities between the wealthy and the poor are aligned directly to power and its abuses. The law, Nell tells us, “is made by the toffs, for the toffs”. Ending up on the wrong side of it, she talks to Billy Blind, joking and lamenting in equal measure: “How come I’ve ended up so far on the wrong side of the law?”
In response, Billy suggests, “Maybe when someone like you ends up on the wrong side of the law … there’s something wrong with the law … and maybe me and you was supposed to do some disruption to redress the balance.”
Their work to redress the balance, alongside an exceptional cast of supporting characters, explores the corruption of government, the control of the news and questions of truthful and objective reporting, poverty and gender-imbalanced opportunities.
Though the setting in 16th century England provides a sense of temporal distance, the contemporary relevance of the issues explored are unlikely to be lost on viewers, who may well be inspired to join Nell in kicking up a rumpus.