You know how much we all loved the first series of Wolf Hall back in 2015, so we’ve been waiting on tenterhooks until the next installment, The Mirror and the Light, finally came to the U.S. via PBS Masterpiece. Was it worth the wait? FUCK YEAH! I mean, sure, it would have been nice not to have to wait, but first Hilary Mantel had to finish writing the final book that the TV show would be based on, which didn’t happen until 2020. So there was that. And unfortunately she died in 2022, making the production team wonder if they should go on at all.
Plus, the costs of making TV at this high quality doubled in the past decade (even with Wolf Hall‘s actors taking pay cuts), all of which forced director Peter Kosminsky to tell the U.K. parliament how they need funding for prestige public broadcasting (psst, so do we in the U.S.! donate to your local station ASAP because jerks in our government cut the minuscule funding PBS currently used to get). Let’s treasure this series as the brilliant jewel it is, and hope to hell it’s not the last we’ll see that respects history as much as storytelling.
I thought I might just give a few recappy highlights, but I was way too excited once I started watching the second series on PBS Passport — a nice perk, btw, of donating to my local station; I can watch online or through my smart TV. All 6 episodes were available at once on Passport, so I could catch up with our British brethren who’d seen it all already.
So here I go through the costumes in the whole series, starting with the first three episodes!
Do you want to read all of this review (with over 4,400 words and about 70 images) about Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light(2024)? The full post is here!
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That “oh shit” face Jane Seymour has during the wedding and shortly after. Given how Henry treated his previous wives, I don’t blame her.
PURPLE AND GOLD GOOD!
Ahem, my apologies, I have my kinks when it comes to colour schemes (as do we all).
On a more serious note, this second series was definitely an upgrade in terms of Henry VIII (Who definitely hit that “What the **** will he do next?!?” sweet spot I like to see in a ‘Great Harry’), but for my money was only decent when it came to Cromwell.
I’m not sure why, it’s a matter of acting talent, Thomas Cromwell just didn’t really grip me this season (and you can tell Ms Hilary Mantel’s effort to sell the man to me had failured spectacularly when my response to his downfall was slightly-embarrassing Glee*).
*Man died because he enabled the tyranny of an Absolute Monarch and then failed to give His Majesty every little thing that he wanted.
I didn’t notice while watching, but they used a clever trick to bulk Damien Lewis up for the second series: they bring the neckline of his shirts all the way up under his chin, rather than leaving his neck exposed as they did in series one. It really makes him look heavier!