Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Vanity Fair’ On Amazon Prime, Where An Orphan Becomes A Social Striver

William Makepeace Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair in 1848, and its been such an enduring classic that it’s been adapted for radio, TV and movies for almost a century. A new miniseries version, the first adaptation since the 2004 Reese Witherspoon film, tries to take Thackeray’s novel and spruce it up a bit for the 21st century. Is it more lively without forgetting that it takes place in the mid-1800s?

VANITY FAIR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The credits roll over a mid-19th century carousel, with soldiers and a few young women ride, one with wild abandon. William Makepeace Thackeray (Michael Palin), welcomes viewers to Vanity Fair, a “very vain, wicked foolish place,” where “everyone is striving for what is not worth having.”

The Gist: We cut to Miss Pinkerton’s Academy For Young Ladies, sometime in the late 1840s. A group of girls are about to graduate and be sent into the world, and Miss Pinkerton (Suranne Jones) has taken this opportunity to fire her French teacher, a fiery young woman named Becky Sharp (Olivia Cooke), who is a French orphan whose parents were artists and other sorts of riff raff.

Pinkerton finds a job for her as a governess, but the always-striving Becky can’t stand the thought of being a live-in teacher to a couple of brats. Because she has a week until her new job starts, she asks Amelia Sedley (Claudia Jessie), one of the graduating students and a good friend, if she can bunk with her family in London. Amelia agrees, much to her parents’ surprise when they see Becky get out of the coach.

Soon, Becky zooms in on Amelia’s brother Jos (David Fynn), who has just come back from India on an antiquities search. Jos is chubby and a bit of a fop, and he’s definitely shy around women, but Becky is fascinated with his travels — and his money. Amelia’s boyfriend and childhood sweetheart, George Osborne (Charlie Rowe), is just back from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and he’s not happy that his friend Jos is falling for Becky. He sees right through her intentions, and after a drunken night at a fair of bacchanalia, he convinces Jos to leave on another antiquities collecting mission.

Our Take: This is the latest adaptation of Thackeray’s 1848 novel; a quick glance of the various radio, TV and movie adaptations, the number is well over a dozen, the last of which was the 2004 film where Reese Witherspoon plays Becky. By all accounts, this version, adapted for TV by Gwyneth Hughes, is fine. It looks great, the costumes are top-notch, the acting is less stuffy than you usually find in period dramas such as these, aided by a modern soundtrack and the actors speaking more like people in the 21st century than the 19th (when Becky gets fired by Miss Pinkerton, for instance, she snidely exclaims, “Free at last!”).

The best part of the series is Olivia Cooke as Becky. We know from the first moments of the show that Becky is not the giggling, resigning girl that people like Miss Pinkerton expect upper-class women to be. She wants adventure, she wants to travel, and the reason why she’s with men is more of a means to an end than about “true love.” While all of those characteristics seem mild now, in the 1840s it makes her a low-class “vixen” or “trollop”, because she’s not submissive. Just by her interest in the fumbling Jos, we know she wants to be upwardly mobile and knows how to get it. Cooke plays Becky with the right balance of wild desire and Victorian-era restraint. But her vivacity can’t be denied, and her performance lifts an ‘ok’ costume drama into something compelling and watchable.

Sex and Skin: Besides some elbows, clavicles and minor decolletage, things are basically covered up.

Parting Shot: After Becky gets driven to her creepy governess assignment by the widowed homeowner, Sir Pitt Crawley (Martin Clunes), and the next morning wakes up to try to figure out how to get out of it… until she sees a handsome soldier ride up and pick up the framed picture of Crowley’s daughters that fell out of Becky’s window. The smile on Becky’s face is as much knowing as relieved.

Sleeper Star: We hope we see more of Fynn as the fumbly, awkward Jos at some point down the line.

Most Pilot-y Line: At the fair, Jos and Becky ask a seer about their fortune. When it doesn’t go their way, Jos says, “I don’t think he’s a real Hindu, Becky.” Ya think?

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this version of Vanity Fair, so Cooke’s performance puts it over the top.

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 Vanity Fair on Amazon Prime Video