Taboo is a very complicated telling of a simple revenge story.
Full spoilers for Taboo's first season continue below.
Taboo was a passion project from the start for series star and executive producer Tom Hardy, and his influence is laced through the DNA of the FX/BBC co-production. The period drama is in the same vein as his previous collaborations with showrunner Steven Knight on Locke and Peaky Blinders, with a dark grittiness and interest at looking at the seedy underbelly of the world.
Like its pedigree suggests, Knight, Hardy and directors Kristoffer Nyholm and Anders Engström bring exquisite cinematography and gorgeous art direction to give the series a unique aesthetic. But for all that it was a beautiful show with solid performances and impressive direction, Taboo's character development and story were continually lacking. In the premiere review, I said the success of Taboo would be determined by how well it would be able to tie together its various storylines in the finale. Despite some high points throughout the season, the finale had many of the same narrative issues that the premiere did.
That's not to say that style of storytelling doesn't have a place on television and an audience that connects with it; it's just not a show that's for everyone. If you're coming to Taboo because you loved Hardy's previous collaborations with Knight, or simply are a fan of Hardy's work, then this is probably a show you will find a lot to love in.
"Episode 1" dropped viewers into a complicated world: James Keziah Delaney (Hardy) returns from home to London in 1814 just in time for his father's funeral. Thought dead for several years after a boating accident off the coast of Africa, Delaney disrupts many parties' plans for a plot of land his father owned named Nootka Sound, including his half-sister Zilpha (Oona Chaplin) and her bankrupt, penniless husband and the East India Company and its leader Stuart Strange (Jonathan Pryce). He inherits his father's shipping company, which disrupts even more people (Franka Potente's Helga, Michael Kelly's Dr. Edgar Dumbarton and Mark Gatiss's Prince Regent, to name a few), and goes about executing a complicated plot to stick it to the EIC.
That makes it sound like Taboo has a relatively simple narrative, but it goes out of its way to obscure that central thread. The first episode dumps the audience straight into this complicated world and doesn't spend much time trying to orient the viewer, instead assuming that they'll be patient and wait for things to come together several episodes in. Delaney constantly has different plots cooking and is working people against one another, and it's frequently difficult to keep all of them straight -- that's how the show packs a punch like it did in the finale when you realize how all of Delaney's plan comes together. And everything does come together, to an extent, though eventually we realize that there's no great mystery to act as a hook for this story. Despite its intentionally abstruse style of telling its story, Taboo is a very complicated and convoluted telling of a simple revenge story.
Like its name promises, Taboo is filled to the brim with illicit subjects and behaviors: slavery, incest, murder, prostitution, dark magic -- the list goes on. It's clear these premises intrigued Hardy, who came up with the general story for Taboo's first season before Knight and his father Edward "Chips" Hardy (who also is an executive producer on the series) wrote the eight scripts. But Taboo oftentimes felt like its story was simply a connective tissue to tie together this collection of taboo behaviors, and the narrative suffered because of it.
Because he has so much invested in this series, Hardy gives a great performance as Delaney. There's a lot riding on him because, while Delaney is the main character, he's not a reliable narrator. For a while Taboo toys with the question of whether he has powers and is seeing visions or is just crazy, and by the end of the season it seems far more likely that he is suffering from PTSD versus dabbling in real magic. The supporting cast are mostly just window dressing for the larger-than-life character of Delaney, which makes sense because Hardy said that character was his initial nugget of an idea for the story that would become Taboo. Some of the supporting characters really paid off, like Lorna Bow (Jessie Buckley) and George Chinchester (Lucian Msamati). But some of them were completely fumbled, like unfortunate story arc for Delaney's half-sister/lover Zilpha.
The Verdict
For all that its story floundered, there is a lot good in Taboo. We've had plenty of period dramas over the years and yet this series still managed to set itself apart and feel different. It is a simply stunning show to watch and had impressive performances, particularly from Hardy. Taboo isn't a show that will connect with everyone, and your enjoyment will likely depend on how much you enjoy Tom Hardy as a performer and appreciate the types of dark stories he gravitates toward.
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