Stream It Or Skip It: ‘My Lady Jane’ On Prime Video, Which Imagines What Happened If Lady Jane Grey Had Lived After Becoming Queen

Sometimes you wish a show wouldn’t try so hard to be irreverent. A new Prime Video series imagines what it would have been like if Lady Jane Grey ascended the British throne and actually lived instead of being executed in a fit of political theater nine days into her reign. That’s not the part that tries too hard to be irreverent, though.

Opening Shot: Over a map of 16th Century England, a narrator (Oliver Chris) talks about the succession of kings and how the Lady Jane Gray ended up on the throne. He describes her as an “intellectual rebel, a bit of a pain in the ass, and a political pawn for her ambitious noble family.” She was married without her consent, ascended the throne against her will; nine days later she was executed as a traitor. What if she became queen and actually lived?

The Gist: Lady Jane Grey (Emily Bader) has no intention of getting married, ever. As she tells her maids/buddies, including Susannah (Máiréad Tyers), her goal is to write a book about medicinal herbs, get it published, and live independently. Her younger sisters, Katherine (Isabella Brownson) and Margaret (Robyn Betteridge), think she’s daft.

Her mother, Lady Frances Grey (Anna Chancellor), has other ideas for Jane. Because her late father had no male heir to leave his fortune to, he left it to his distant uncle, the Duke of Leicester (Jim Broadbent), a lascivious old coot who has a rotting toe, a disdain for women reading books, and a gleam in his eye for Katherine. Frances feels that she needs to get married to a scion of the family of super-rich noble Lord Dudley (Rob Brydon) in order to protect the Greys’ living situation. Jane steadfastly refuses.

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Jane is so serious that she makes a plan with Susannah to escape. But the two of them get caught by Frances, and, to escape being accused of theft and kidnapping, Susannah turns into a falcon and flies off. It turns out that Susannah is an Ethian, who can shift in between human and animal form and back again. They are enemies of the kingdom, and ones that are caught are “dunked”, basically waterboarded to death.

Jane continues to fight her mother about her impending nuptials to Lord Guildford Dudley (Edward Bluemel), whom she only knows by his rakish reputation. She follows her mother to Dudley’s castle, and thinks she’s met Guildford, who seems to be a foppish scumbag. When she tells Lord Dudley that she doesn’t want to get married, he tells her point-blank, “No one cares about what you want.”

Thinking that her cousin, the sickly King Edward (Jordan Peters) can fix this, she goes to visit him. He tells her that he approved of the marriage. If he has to be a dying king, which he never wanted, she has to marry in order to protect her family. His half-sisters Mary (Kate O’Flynn) and Bess (Abbie Hern) are constantly kissing up to him, hoping to be named his successor. He says this in between coughs, because he has “the affliction,” which he knows will take him soon. When he collapses after an attack, Jane saves him with one of herbal remedies.

After she’s booted out of the castle, she grabs a horse from the carriage and tries to hide. She goes to a pub, where she sees a handsome but rude swashbuckler (Edward Bluemel). As the narrator mentions, it may not have been love at first sight, but it certainly was lust at first sight.

Dudley and other lords push King Edward to name a successor and Dudley manages to persuade the king to give Jane the crown when he dies. Of course, it’s in his best interest to do so, given the fact that his son is supposed to marry her.

A bounty hunter comes into the tavern, looking for a guy named Archer (Michael Workeye). As we find out, Archer is an Ethian, and can turn into a ferocious grizzly bear. In the chaos that ensues after Archer transforms, Susannah flies in and is surprised to see Jane.

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Jane gets caught helping Susannah escape, and is about to be dunked when her mother comes and gets her. The wedding will go forward, and Jane plans on getting out of it using one of Margaret’s fake blood packets. But she’s shocked when she sees who Guildford Dudley actually is.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? My Lady Jane is in the category of costume drama that’s made into more of a dramedy due to modern dialogue, rock music and (in this case) cheeky narration. Other shows in this genre are The Great , The White Queen , The Buccaneers and Dickinson .

Our Take: Gemma Burgess is the showrunner of My Lady Jane , which is based on the book by Brodi Ashton, Cynthia Hand and Jodi Meadows . It’s a show that’s trying to slide into the now very popular Bridgerton genre of modernized, sexy costume dramedy. But the show is of two minds, thanks to that aforementioned cheeky narration by Oliver Chris.

The narration — with an assist by the rock soundtrack — makes the show feel like a curse-filled, irreverent rethinking of a story that’s 500 years old, with the naughtiness of the attraction between Jane and Guildford layered on to make it even more modern.

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But, when we’re seeing Jane doing her thing, we’re seeing a pretty standard plot play out. Sure, we enjoyed Emily Bader’s performance as the strong and independent Jane, but we’ve seen this plot a million times, especially lately. Women were treated like property, and in modern costume dramas, the women are portrayed as educated and independent, with no desire to get married off to some fop of a nobleman in order to make some political allyship or be a part of some other business transaction.

The twist, of course, is that this is a historical parallel universe, where Jane became queen and lived instead of dying after being made an example by her underlings. It’s a narrative that should stand on its own. But the first episode kept cramming in the narration which seemed to be somewhat off-tone compared to the rest of the show. Any show that needs that much exposition to move things along is one that has narrative issues.

Sex and Skin: Some semi-clothed sex, like when Jane comes across Susannah with a man’s head between her legs (but under her skirt). When the king’s dog Petunia turns out to be a Ethian, the woman that the dog turns into (Tallulah Greive) is naked, but only seen from the shoulders up.

Parting Shot: Despite seeing who she’s marrying, Jane still fakes having “the affliction,” pretending she’s coughing up blood and passing out. But her groom is onto her game.

Sleeper Star: We are Máiréad Tyers fans, due to her great work in Extraordinary. It’s good to see her in other roles, especially one like Susannah, who takes no crap and literally flies off when in danger.

Most Pilot-y Line: “It’s just one of those things that you’re born with, like being left-handed or the color of your eyes,” says the narrator about being an Ethian.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There are many moments when My Lady Jane has its try-hard hat on in an attempt to make it more irreverent than it actually is. But the performances of Bader, Tyers and others save the show from being a complete mess, and the actual parallel-universe story is an intriguing one to follow.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

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