Better, though never as creepy or as evocative as you’d like, is the Gothic horror story, which sees the isolated and superstitious villagers grabbing their crucifixes and sharpening stakes as more disappearances are attributed to the serpent. The most pedestrian aspect is the social-change drama, in which Cora and her politically minded lady’s maid and best friend, Martha (Hayley Squires), try to empower women and help the poor.
There’s a lot going on inside “The Essex Serpent,” not all of it successful, though the mini-series is generally handsome, literate and quite well acted. Freed from one monster, she sets off in search of another. There are hints that Cora suffered abuse at his hands, and his death liberates her she can do what she wants, and she follows her passion for natural history to the fishing village where the creature was supposedly seen, thinking that it might be a plesiosaur, a dinosaur that has evaded evolution.
The show begins with the disappearance of a young girl in the gloomy marshes of Essex, which is blamed on a mysterious sea creature, and the death of Cora’s husband in their London mansion after a long illness. Cora has a lot in common with Carrie Mathison in “Homeland”: She’s headstrong, charming, a little narcissistic, coping with trauma and always the smartest person in the parlor. Things are still pretty chilly for her, though.ĭanes plays the wealthy widow Cora Seaborne in this six-episode mini-series, an adaptation of the award-winning novel by Sarah Perry, which premiered Friday.
Two years after we left her snooping around Moscow in “Homeland,” she has re-emerged in Victorian England, pottering about the coast in “The Essex Serpent” on Apple TV+.
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