Are you au fait with The Essex Serpent? Not some dirty sobriquet for the trousers of TOWIE’s Mark Harper, but Apple TV+’s new six-part blockbuster series, a Victorian hunt for a monstrous, watery killer — in Essex, of all places — out Friday, 13 May.
Who stars in The Essex Serpent?
The stars? Tom Hiddleston as hunky vicar Will Ransome and Claire Danes (with a terrifically plummy English accent) as oddball aspiring naturalist Clara Seaborne, intrigued by the newspaper headline “Sea Dragon Sighted in Essex”. And seriously, who wouldn’t be? Especially when the cast also features Cleménce Poésy (Tenet) – who’ll play Stella Ransom, wife of Will and close friend of Cora – Frank Dillane (Fear the Walking Dead), Hayley Squires (Adult Material) and Jamael Westman (Anne Boleyn). All aboard!
What is The Essex Serpent about?
The gist? Based on the award-winning novel by Sarah Perry, and stuffed with brooding, misty shots of Essex’s 19th Century marshland, here a fell beastie of local folklore is, or isn’t, plucking young girls from the fictional village of Aldwinter, never to be seen again. Dark shapes slither deep beneath the waves. A tight-knit community teeters on the brink of mass hysteria. Hiddleston’s vicar, Ransome, thinks it’s all an “invention, a symptom of the times we live in”. Danes’s newly-widowed Seaborne thinks it’s all real. Seaborne, a cheerful sort fleeing an awful past, and Ransome flirt dangerously. Splash!
So, is The Essex Serpent real or not?
The twist? There is real depth to this darkly sensual Victorian creature feature with strong, feminist heft. Not a loch or a Nessie in sight, maybe, but plenty of crackling intrigue. The characters in The Essex Serpent declare the coming of the beast to be a punishment for their sins, or a symptom of their times, while Cora Seaborne believes it to be a surviving dinosaur. Of course, the age-old question — is the ‘blackwater beast’ a red herring flung by more terrible monsters lurking closer to home? — stalks the marshes and the village.
Think more of the slow-burn Arctic wilderness horror of Ridley Scott’s The Terror (BBC) than dorky Doctor Who. But, with the first two episodes dropping on Friday 13 May, do save a spot behind the sofa (and finally sign up to Apple TV+, from £4.99 a month) early. The only way is The Essex Serpent, after all.