I Watch TV: The Doll Factory

 

The Doll Factory

It’s London in 1851. Iris and her sister Rose work in a doll shop painting dolls. Rose was engaged, but then got smallpox and is scarred. Iris wants to be an artist, and also this is a sexual thing for her, bound up in her voyeurism.

Silas is a taxidermist, studying to be a surgeon. His Shop Of Curiosities Antique And New is patronised by artists, looking for animals to use as models, grudgingly acknowledging him as a craftsman, though not a gentleman. He has ambitions, plans to show at the Great Exhibition. He also intends to court Iris.

Louis Frost is a pre-Raphaelite* painter, who wants Iris as a model. Iris wants to be taught to be an artist. The doll shop owner wants to marry her off, as the more troublesome one, the one with the looks. Iris doesn’t want that. So events get into motion as she leaves to stay in a women’s boarding house.

They all have secrets. They all have visions. Bluebell, a sex worker who works out of a pub both Silas and the artists frequent, is murdered. More people will be killed.

A period drama that’s not quite a mystery or thriller, too interested in the love lives and artistry, too fascinated in seeing how respectable and disrespected meet each other. Which makes the revelations seem extraordinary leaps rather than the genre tropes they are, transplanted into new setting.

Watch This: Stylish and stylised period drama with many twists and turns
Don’t Watch This: The obvious clues point to the obvious villains

* A fictional one, though several of his cronies are real ones.