‘Belgravia’ arrives on Amazon and spawns a spinoff
If you’re a lover of TV’s more polite period dramas, you’ve had a lot to feed your hunger in recent years. Some of these series, which blend romance with changing social mores, have been more traditional, like HBO’s “The Gilded Age” and PBS’s “Sanditon,” a very loose version of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel. Some have been shot through with contemporary flourishes, such as Netflix’s “Bridgerton” and Apple TV+’s “The Buccaneers.” And some have been overtly comic, including Hulu’s “The Great” and Apple TV+’s “Dickinson.”
“Belgravia,” a 2020 miniseries from “Downton Abbey” guy Julian Fellowes, is one of the more conventional releases. Set in the 1840s, it takes on some of the same issues as Fellowes’s “The Gilded Age,” notably the conflicts between entitled old money and new money. The story lines aren’t especially fresh — forbidden love, dark secrets from the past — and the upstairs material fares better than the downstairs, but still. It’s all lifted to a higher level by a pair of engaging performances from Tamsin Greig and Harriet Walter. It originally ran on Epix, which has morphed into MGM+, but you can now stream it on Amazon.
I mention it because MGM+ has just premiered a spinoff of “Belgravia,” called “Belgravia: The Next Chapter,” and it, too, is a mild, pretty diversion, a collection of plots we’ve seen before but don’t mind seeing again. Written by Helen Edmundson instead of Fellowes, it’s set a few decades after “Belgravia,” and it looks into the children and grandchildren of the original characters.
Most of it revolves around a new marriage gone wrong between Clara (Harriet Slater) and Frederick (Ben Wainwright), who is tormented by memories of his father’s mistreatment. Rather than talking about his bitter feelings, and healing, he stuffs them down and gives them more power. Before long, Clara hates to be around him. He despises his brother, James, a kind local reverend with his own personal torment as a closeted gay man.
The story lines include the financial ambitions of a newly arrived and extremely wealthy French businesswoman, a child with epilepsy being hidden by his parents out of shame, and a suicidal mystery woman James tries to help.
It’s all beautifully filmed and engaging enough for those looking to escape to the melodrama of another time and place, and you don’t need to have seen “Belgravia” to follow the action. You do need to have MGM+, though; the series is not on Amazon yet.