Hulu’s ‘Harlots’ Turns A Spectacular Trick: An Honest, Empathetic Look At Sex Work

Forgive the pun, but Hulu‘s new drama Harlots turns a spectacular trick. It lures you in with its seedy name and its titillating subject matter — the warring whores of Georgian London. It even sparks things off with a seductive opening featuring giggling young prostitutes celebrating their good fortune in a booming brothel. But then, it turns sharply. It somersaults into a raw and heartfelt examination of sexism, sex work, and sexual abuse. It presents an empathetic look at sinners and an unflinching look at victims. Harlots is a jaw-dropping drama that won’t give you easy answers or trite comforts, though it will take you on an emotional ride through the ups and downs of being a sex worker (of any status) in 18th century England.
I should pause here and admit that Harlots tackles a topic that is fraught with controversy: sex work (and, by extension, sexual abuse). How these matters should or shouldn’t be depicted onscreen is a source of bitter debate. Harlots doesn’t moralize, though. “It just looks at the industry from the workers perspective and that industry happens to be the sex industry,” Executive Producer and creator Moira Buffini explained to me. “It looks at it from a very, very female perspective and it’s really nice to see that lens turned on it. Every time I start watching a drama now I’m on the lookout, on the alert, for how women are treated and, particularly, how sex work is treated. Usually they’re either naked or dead. In most dramas you get the dead whore at the beginning and the drama is about how you deal with a dead whore. So, I don’t know, I hope this comes from a really, really different place and just shines a really different light.”

In fact, what makes Harlots so fresh and so arresting is that none of the men or women in question are used as window-dressing. They comprise a massive chorus of vibrant voices, each one possessing their own point of view. Harlots also escapes another cliché. There’s no “hooker with a heart of gold.” No one we meet is perfect. Instead, these characters simply have heart. As a result, we don’t get any easy answers from Harlots. There’s no judgment, either.
“I wouldn’t judge anyone working in the sex industry. I have no moral judgement about that,” Buffini told me. “There is an inequality in our relations with one another and in our society that means it. This is the reality for a lot of women’s lives and that inequality saddens and outrages me, as it does a lot of us. I think it should be outspoken about, it should be held up in the light. You don’t need to bang a drum about it, you just need to go, ‘Look at this. Look at this from that person’s perspective. Look at their life. Imagine that,’ and that’s what we’ve tried to do.” 

Harlots follows two rival brothels in 18th Century London. There’s Margaret Wells’s earthy, colorful, and messy house of bawds and Lydia Quigley’s powdered and pastel mansion of high-class horrors. Samantha Morton plays Margaret Wells as a woman torn between her maternal instincts (her daughters, Charlotte and Lucy, are the toast of the town and her “girls” are treated with kindness) and her thirst to topple Lydia Quigley (Lesley Manville). The two women’s bitter rivalry stretches back to a personal scuffle that has to do with Lydia pulling young Margaret into the trade. Lydia Quigley believes she is helping the young women she employs, even if she sometimes tricks them into prostitution and keeps them under lock and key.

“You know, my character does some terrible things. She tricks girls. She goes and meets girls getting off the boat and she tricks them into thinking she’s going to look after them and they’re going to come to work in a nice house and be like a maid or something,” Manville told me after the show’s TCA panel in January. “But to her mind, you see, she’s doing those girls a favor. Because they could be on the street or they could be someplace like Margaret’s, which to Lydia’s eyes, is not anywhere near as nice.”
Margaret’s house might not have the flowers and the perfume of Lydia’s, but it is a place where wit and warmth are allowed. It’s also where her own daughters learned the family trade. Through the elder daughter, Charlotte Wells (Jessica Brown Findlay), we see what life inside the gilded cage of a celebrated courtesan looks like. She has money and means and all the men of London at her feet, but her fortunes are tied to the whims of fops (like Fleabag standout Hugh Skinner). She has the trappings of freedom, but not the reality of it. Meanwhile, her little sister Lucy (Eloise Smyth) is being pushed into the world of sex work before she’s quite ready. The family’s finances rest on the fawn-like girl’s ability to rope in high-bidders for her virginity. Lucy might think she’s ready to be a dazzling courtesan like her sister, but the realities of being bought and used are not as glamorous as she’s been led to believe.

Harlots joins the ranks of a number of contemplative female-driven dramas airing this spring. Like Big Little Lies, it scratches away at the gossamer veneer stretching over women’s lives to expose the horror underneath. Like FEUD: Bette and Joan, it details how the patriarchy twists women’s minds against one another. And, like Hulu’s big, splashy The Handmaid’s Tale (coming next month), it takes a magnifying lens to the tetchy subject of women’s sexual rights. However, Harlots isn’t as pretty as Big Little Lies, it isn’t as campy as FEUD, and it certainly isn’t as austere as The Handmaid’s Tale. Instead, it shares the same roughshod rockabilly vibe as Netflix’s Peaky Blinders. It’s riotous, complicated, raucous, heartfelt, and honest — and I’m genuinely curious to see if it hits the same chords as Blinders. Viewers are comfortable with rooting for sinners when they are a family of violent gangsters, but does that sympathy extend to whores?
Harlots doesn’t tell the story of prostitution within the realm of a straight and narrow path where good is good and evil is evil. Instead, the story sprints out in infinite directions like the tentacles of a sea monster, grasping out for something better. What the characters in the show get, though, is sometimes something far worse than they started out with.
Harlots debuts on Hulu this Wednesday, March 29th. 

Stream Harlots on Hulu