Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
It’s the early 1920s—not long after the end of the Great War—and Paul Pennyfeather is a quiet young man, studying to be an Anglican priest. One fateful night, as he’s walking back to his college, a mob of drunken toffs attacks him, steals his clothes, and leaves him to scurry back to his quarters. While the rich kids are rampaging, a pair of masters is gleefully totting up the fines they’ll be able to collect. But Paul is poor, so he gets expelled for walking across Oxford naked.
This is the sort of scenario that is more meaningful to the British than it is to most of us on the other side of the Atlantic. When the action shifts from Oxford to a horrible boarding school in Wales—the disgraced Pennyfeather is reduced to teaching—Decline and Fall (streaming now on Acorn TV) seems even more like an entertainment for extreme Anglophiles only.
And then Margot Beste-Chetwynde appears…
One of my biggest worries when I started watching was that Eva Longoria was going to play an Englishwoman, and that her accent would be an international embarrassment. I am happy to report that her Margot is from California, and that Longoria is a delight. Like a classic screwball heroine, Margot is an agent of chaos. She’s daffy, she’s self-absorbed, and she might have murdered her husband.
Margot’s son is a student at the school where Pennyfeather teaches, and her arrival at a school fete provokes stares and silence. I will admit that my jaw dropped. The last thing these middle-class people expect to see is a tall, large black man—and it’s the last thing I expect to see, too—but Margot’s escort is, in fact, a tall, large black man. This is the moment when what feels like a purely parochial and mild little satire of English education and class systems gets bonkers.
A little lordling whom no one—not even his mother—likes gets shot in the foot by what’s supposed to be a starting pistol. Grimes—another master at the school—gets caught in flagrante delicto with a handsome young driver. And Pennyfeather loses his heart completely to Margot Beste-Chetwynde.
Pennyfeather’s instant infatuation with his student’s glamorous, American mother is a major moment in this development of this character, and Jack Whitehall is absolutely terrific in his portrayal of a chaste, unassuming, altogether flaccid young man who becomes slightly unhinged—and emboldened—by love. Whitehall is able to convey a wide range of emotions—mostly variations on befuddlement and mortification—even as Pennyfeather struggles to maintain a worldly façade.
The supporting cast is also excellent. Fans of Masterpiece Theatre—and surely the overlap between Masterpiece devotees and Acorn subscribers must be considerable—will enjoy seeing Hercules Poirot (David Suchet) as an imperious headmaster. Game of Thrones fans might note that Gemma Whelan brings a bit of Yara Greyjoy to the role of Diana, the headmaster’s daughter. And Stephen Graham—Boardwalk Empire’s Al Capone—is hilariously menacing as the mysterious butler Philbrick.
The third installment in this miniseries takes a surprisingly dark turn, but Pennyfeather’s misadventures have endeared him to a number of loyal, resourceful, and not entirely scrupulous friends. With their help, he emerges older, wiser, and… right back where he always wanted to be.
Jessica Jernigan is a writer, editor, and mom-about-town in a mid-sized Midwestern city. You can find her professional website here, but Instagram is where the cat photos are.
