I didn’t expect Dope Girls (2025) to come to the U.S. at all, but I guess Hulu makes sense somehow. This isn’t typical PBS fare, despite being produced by the BBC, though I suppose the series would fit on Netflix or Amazon, since those streamers have dabbled in the genre of “terrible people doing terrible things in low light” as much as Hulu may have.
Set in the 1910s right after World War I, with “soldiers returning home” as an initial theme, this super-dark and gritty six-part show focuses on one woman’s entry into the London nightclub scene. The main character, Kate Galloway, is very loosely based on Kate Meyrick who opened the 43 Club in Soho in 1920. The TV series Kate (Julianne Nicholson) is something of a cipher. She goes from barely-above-poverty housewife to successful nightclub owner. How is improbable, why is never explored. She just starts as a struggling mom and turns into a criminal mastermind and badass business owner in the blink of an eye.
She’s not the only one with unclear or missing motivations in this show. I guess you could say “survival” is everyone’s motivation, but many of them are hardly surviving and they’re risking violent death constantly (and experiencing a lot of violence along the way). I can’t tell if there’s more to these characters. I never really came to care about any of these people, and I didn’t understand them. Not until maybe episode 4 are there hints of motivation and an explanation of WTfrock is going on and why these people are behaving the way they are. And even then, it’s just hints.
Kate’s daughter Evie (Eilidh Fisher) is just a sad-sack, first getting picked on at a private boarding school for being a charity case, then going home because her father’s dead. When she and her mom move to London, Evie alternates between hanging with her fancy-pants school chum and seeing a spiritualist to contact her dad’s ghost.
Billie (Umi Myers) is supposedly the center of the story, taking in Kate and Evie to her spacious and gorgeous London flat, where her pal/dance partner Eddie also occasionally lives (how does Billie afford this place? nobody knows). Billie introduces Kate to the illegal nightclub where she dances burlesque. But Billie wants to be a real dancer, not just a stripper, though she doesn’t make a very strenuous effort at that dream. She does get the biggest wardrobe, even if most of it is fanciful, fairly modern stage wear.
Obviously this isn’t a straightforward period piece, and Umi Myers told Country & Town House:
“The visual world of Dope Girls is strong. It’s punchy, like the script. The aesthetic is very eclectic, a mixture of textures and colour and light, period details with a modern flair. This was the combined genius of Sophie (our costume designer), Mirna (our hair and make-up designer) and Sharree (our production designer). Mirna drew inspiration from the period, of course, but keeping in line with the ethos of our period drama, she used many modern references from fashion photography, paintings and musicians to build Billie’s look.”
Myers continued in the interview:
“I had gold paint dripping down my face and intricate waves in my hair. Sophie made sure that Billie’s costume told the story of who she is and where she comes from; the idea of being almost draped and pinned into certain dresses, her theatricality — as if she has stolen pieces from a theatre’s costume box to wear in her everyday, the idea that she would have made her dance costumes herself. She had detailing in her costume design that expressed the fusion of cultures that Billie was exposed to in Soho, in the textiles, patterns, colour choice. One of the most amazing costumes is what I call the golden hedgehog, an amazing replica and homage to one of Josephine Baker’s costumes. I don’t think I will ever top that.”
Billie’s other stage outfits are just as outrageous…
Costume designer Sophie Canale says in the BBC media pack:
“When we slowly go into the club world you get this essence of all the bohemians, the artisans and the dancers, and I really wanted to show that in the costumes, so they may not be period correct but there’s a lot of fun and charm in there. I think that we all know Soho has lots of stories and secrets behind closed doors – it’s about bringing those out into the world.”
The last of the “dope girls” is Violet (Eliza Scanlen), who wants desperately to be one of the first female police officers. When she just barely gets the job, she’s told to go undercover in the nightclubs, where she gets entangled with the other characters and their sordid lives. Violet worked in a munitions factory during the war, so I guess she’s used to dangerous work, but is she really that desperate to take an even worse job? Why not just clean houses, IDK.
I really didn’t care about the supposed villains of the piece, the Salucci family — just a bunch of cliched Italian mobsters with a nasty mother at the helm and two brothers bickering for her attention. Who hasn’t seen that before?
To go with all the other stuff I wasn’t impressed by, let’s throw in the silly scrawled text overlays that inform us of a character’s tally of crimes and such, which is neither helpful nor amusing. I did appreciate that the cast was appropriately multicultural for the nightclub milieu (and fuck the whiners in reviews who complained about that).
And while the throbbing modern soundtrack was very meh, the actual singing by Eddie (Michael Duke) during the nightclub performances was excellent. That felt true to the period and the setting, being sultry ragtime-esque tunes, and easily relatable like modern R&B vibes. See? It’s not that hard.
Are you giving Dope Girls a try?
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I watched it, kept hoping it was going to get better, but (spoiler) it didn’t. All dark, all the time, and exactly as you said, nobody has any motivation.
I watched the first episode months ago on the BBC and then forgot about it. Since the show is post WWI, the time period would be 1919-1920, so close to the era when Kate Meyrick opened her club. Caresse Crosby had patented her version of the bra in 1914.
There are soldiers still returning from the war in the first eps, it’s supposedly right after the war. And just bec. there’s a patent doesn’t mean it was widely used (also, that version of a bra looks very little like what Billie’s wearing).
I’m not going to lie, my impression was that Kate wasn’t so much entering a new criminal career as returning to a way of life she’d done her best to escape from, once upon a time: she’s trying to keep ahead, but I’m not sure she doesn’t actually suffer some legitimate psychological disorder (Possibly Borderline Personality Disorder) since her behaviour strongly suggests someone with a deeply messed up sense of right and wrong.
Violet’s motivation would seem to be pure Ambition – she clearly wants to wield authority and earn the respect that goes with it, whether or not she can land real power to boot (At least that’s my read on why she isn’t pursuing a less stressful job – this and the fact that pursuing less stressful paths to social respect would almost certainly require that she marry at some point, which is obviously impractical for her and may actively seem repulsive).
Being able to shelter behind the uniform when questioned about her unusual decision to enter a male profession and avoid family life probably doesn’t hurt (Heck, she might be hoping to find a surrogate family in the Met to boot, though that’s probably a speculation too far).
Billie is obviously torn between her desire to dance her way out of the seedier side of London, really let her freak flag fly (Which would probably condemn her to a lifetime in the said seedier side of life) and a powerful desire to reconnect with family complicated by painful resentment of her birth mother.
It doesn’t help that she’s occasionally high as a kite either.
I can’t decide if Evie has the simplest or the most complicated motivations, because at heart she wants to be Grown Up (Or at least treated as a Grown Up), but is still trying to decide what she really, really wants out of life (If only because life keeps taking twists & turns that leave her wondering what the heck happened, not least because she keeps being given the ‘mushroom treatment’ by Mum, leaving her to turn to occult means in order to try understand what’s happened to her life and how she feels about it).
Of course it doesn’t help that none of these people are master planners and that they’re often being buffered by the tides of History (often laced with blood from the lingering casualties and consequences of the Great War) in a way that requires them to go with the flow or sink.
Meh I watched enough of it to get that it was pretentious and boring and creepily obsessed with seeing women suffer at the hands of sadistic men and I’m so absolutely over that voyeuristic crap. If it isn’t brilliantly done (it never is) then I am OUT.
I loved it. It was fun to me and I hope another season comes out