Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Howards End’, A Starz Miniseries About Three British Families At The Beginning Of The 20th Century

If you were a fan of the Merchant-Ivory costume dramas of the ’80s and ’90s, then Starz has something that will occupy your next month: a miniseries remake of Howards End, with Hayley Atwell in the role that made Emma Thompson a star. Can the miniseries repeat the success of the movie?

HOWARDS END: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A postman walks along a London street, his craggy face crossed with annoyed surprise when a horse and carriage passes him in one direction and a motorcar passes him in the other. He eventually walks up to the mailbox of a well-kept townhouse and puts a letter in the mailbox.

The Gist: The carriage and motorcar are there to tell you that we’re at the turn of the 20th century, 1901 to be exact. Queen Victoria has recently passed on and women are starting to assert their rights in England and other Western nations. The letter is from Helen Schlegel (Philippa Coulthard) to her older sister Margaret (Hayley Atwell); Helen is staying with the Wilcox family, whom the Schlegels met on a trip to Germany, at their summer residence, Howards End. She’s enamored with the house, the forthrightness of the Wilcox men, and the ethereal, above-it-all nature of the family matriarch, Ruth (Julia Ormond).

In her usual impulsive way, she gets engaged to the youngest Wilcox brother, Paul (Jonah Hauer-King); Margaret (Meg to her family), who raised Helen and their neurotic brother Tibby (Alex Lawther) after their parents died, is alarmed but wants to go to Howards End to make sure this is what Helen wants. Meg’s somewhat daft Aunt Juley (Tracey Ullman), on the other hand, thinks this is all horrible. She volunteers to go when Meg decides to watch over a sick Tibby. But by the time Aunt Juley gets off the train, Helen has broken things off, citing how empty it seems the lives of the men are, especially family patriarch Henry (Matthew Macfadyen), who believes in the ope market and not in gender equality, but shuts the hell up when Ruth ends the dinner table discussion.

That fall, the Wilcoxes rent a flat across the street from the Schlagels’ townhouse, and after some initial rudeness that Meg regrets, she becomes fast friends with Ruth, who is lying in bed while the family is on a trip. Ruth loves Meg’s youthful energy, the lively discussions she has with her friends, and the fact that she can assert herself so well when women in her generation were often shunted to the background. She really wants Meg to come see Howards End, and Meg eventually agrees, meeting her at the train station after initially refusing.

Our Take: We will readily admit that turn-of-the-century costume dramas are not our thing. We never saw the 1992 Merchant-Ivory version of Howards End. We didn’t even get into Downton Abbey because of our aversion to this kind of drama, which moves slowly, often utilizes the formal upper-crust British idioms and dialogue used at the time, is too steeped in how phonily polite society people were to each other then.

Just by nature of its length, the miniseries version of Howards End, written by Kenneth Lonergan of Manchester by the Sea, likely hews closer to the original E.M. Forster novel than the movie does. But that also means that the first episode moves very, very slowly. In the first hour, we know about the Schalgels’ relationship with the Wilcoxes, Meg’s lonely practicality and Helen’s impetuousness. We’re introduced to the relationship Meg and Ruth develop. And we get a glimpse of the life of Leonard Bast (Joseph Quinn), a working class man who is married to Jacky (Rosalind Eleazar), a woman of questionable repute, who has an encounter with the Schlagel women and comes away from it desiring their lives.

But the meat of the story starts in episode 2, as we noticed in the coming attractions, when Ruth dies and bequeaths Howards End to Meg, who falls for Henry Wilcox, and all the issues involving these three families comes to the fore. If you’re a fan of the novel or the 1992 movie, you’ll likely want to come along for the ride. But if you’re like us, who get restless when they see bowlers and bonnets and hear overly-formal dialogue, there wasn’t much incentive for us to watch more, despite the performances from Atwell, Ullman, Ormand and Coulthard, and the lovely cinematography and costumes.

Sex and Skin: It’s Edwardian England, among the upper class. Any romance is quite chaste.

Parting Shot: Just as Ruth and Meg are about to step on the train to go to Howards End, Ruth’s husband and children step off the train, wonder why she’s there, and take her back to the flat. Ruth looks on with a longing wonder of what might have happened in the country.

Sleeper Star: We would watch Tracey Ullman do just about anything, and even opposite the formidable Atwell, she steals every scene she’s in.

Most Pilot-y Line: They just needed to speed things up a bit in the first episode, maybe to hook in people like us that don’t have an affinity towards this kind of drama.

Our Call: Stream It. Just because we were bored silly doesn’t mean that a fan of these kinds of dramas wouldn’t like it. It’s well acted, well-written and looks great. But it’s just not our cup of Earl Grey.

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, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Howards End on Starz