This summer, in the wake of a disappointing Bridgerton season, no one — at least no one on my Twitter and Tiktok feeds — would shut up about the release of “My Lady Jane.” It’s a TV-14 historical fantasy series for which a large selling point was the fact that it stepped on “Bridgerton”’s toes with its modernized period romance plotline. It was heralded as funny, sexy and romantic. It honestly seemed like something I would have liked in middle school and, I don’t know if it was the heat or the long hours of working behind a service desk, but one day I broke and decided to watch it. All of it. I binged all eight episodes of “My Lady Jane” in one day, and boy do I want that time back.
In defense of my somewhat manic eight-hour watch party, “My Lady Jane” is a show designed to be binged. A disembodied voice provides exposition, a feature that has proven popular in many other direct-to-streamer shows (“Jane the Virgin” or “Never Have I Ever” and, of course, “Bridgerton” come to mind) and it requires very little mental engagement to enjoy. Any tedious, thought-provoking mysteries are only really left as mysteries for the characters; the show’s voice has a lewd and shocking sense of humor — especially considering the young adult book it was based on — and the plot never meanders, just jerks from twist to twist, giving audiences very little time to catch their breath.
The show follows an altered version of the story of real-life, nine-day queen, Lady Jane Grey. Why is it altered? The narrator kicks us off with a very direct explanation: “Jane could have been the leader England needed but instead history remembers her as the ultimate damsel in distress. Fuck that. What if history were different?” It’s all very tongue-in-cheek.
Never fear — in this version, we are not doing real-life person Lady Jane Grey a disservice by depicting the very real unjustified death she suffered at the hands of Tudor-era England. She is no longer an agency-less political puppet for the members at court, who dies as a result of political maneuvering out of her control. She is no longer a helpless damsel who is a discredit to feminism. Instead, she is an empowered, fearless firecracker who … is still an agency-less political puppet for the members at court. But it’s okay! She doesn’t technically die in this one! And her husband is hot!
The show rejects the real Jane Grey’s tragedy, only to parade around her name and world, discovering along the way that just because Jane has a visible personality, it doesn’t make her any less subject to the misogyny of the time. She is still sidelined, still accused of bogus charges and sentenced to execution because of them. It’s like the show is dancing around the reason all of this happened to her. It disparages the real figure Lady Jane Grey as a damsel in distress and trades her in for a newer model. This one is smart! She has aspirations! And an attitude! And by the time the story is over, it’s like the show has realized — extremely late in the process — that all of these upgrades are for naught. The blame for Jane Grey’s imprisonment and death is not to be placed on Jane Grey’s personality, but on the political situation around her. Shocking. You can’t change the course of her life by throwing in a combative personality. The tragedy of Lady Jane Grey’s story is her lack of agency.
The opening narration is a symptom of the larger problem I have with the show: its shallowness. There’s no message about the real Jane Grey’s life or her treatment in the history books, and there’s no message beyond the attempted dissolution of prejudice towards their token suppressed group: Ethians — magical humans that can turn into animals at will. A conflict that is based on the real-life conflict between Catholics and Protestants during that time period.
While I understand not wanting to go on a deep dive about Tudor-era religious tensions in a young adult book — a designation for books targeted towards readers aged 18, but also 12 — this kind of world-building is not uncommon in many young adult fantasy novels. A simple narrative about this kind of group antagonism is something that younger audiences can benefit from. Learning to challenge the status quo and critically engage with the world around them is a valuable skill, and it’s not uncommon to see these diluted, black-and-white, “them-vs.-us” narratives in the YA genre. That being said, if the one part of your show that gives away that it was based on a YA novel is the political messaging, it’s not a good sign.
I would expect that a TV-14 show, especially one that so severely cements itself as mature with the excessive amounts of crude jokes, could handle those complexities. Instead, these fantastical changes to Lady Jane’s story feel not only unnecessary, but hollow, and a slap in the face to the real historical figures involved.
So why is the Internet so in love with this show? As I mentioned before, it’s extremely bingeable. It reveals answers to mysteries to the audience before the characters even know the mystery exists, like a soap opera with the curtain pulled back — even the shock value of a character coming back from the dead, or having a secret identity cannot be delayed or foreshadowed.
Recently, I’ve started to see certain music criticized for pandering to the TikTok formula: short, dopamine-producing, 15-second-long videos. It seems that audiences are starting to pick up on artists and labels valuing virality and commercial potential over artistic authenticity. “My Lady Jane” certainly makes me wonder if this criticism can be applied to other pieces of media as well. The fast-paced and dramatic dialogue seems ripe for the popular practice of content clipping: short excerpts of shows on TikTok designed to grab your attention and result in you watching an entire movie split into 30 parts.
I certainly wouldn’t put it past Amazon Prime to prioritize this rapid-fire and clippable entertainment. The streamer canceled “My Lady Jane” after its first season, seemingly holding it to impossibly high standards in terms of popularity and streaming numbers. As much as I would like to believe so, perhaps “My Lady Jane’s” poor writing was not the only cause of its cancellation.
My issues with the show perhaps reach beyond the writer’s room, but they boil down to this: Jane is imbued with qualities of strength and intelligence, forgetting that in Tudor-era England, it did not matter how strong or smart a woman was, she was still a woman. It bucks the real Jane Grey and her status as a “damsel in distress” from the opening narration, failing to realize she could have been all the things the show’s Jane was: confident, smart and reckless, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Jane’s fate is the same on screen as it is in the history books.
Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
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