Season 14 - The Jewel in the Crown (1984-1985)
This is the miniseries everyone holds up as the gold standard? THIS!?! This screed of hate where anyone viewed as "other" dies horrifically!?! THIS!?! I am honestly baffled by anyone loving this series. We are introduced to two lovely characters, Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar. Hari was born in India but educated in England at the same school as Daphne's brother. Returning home Hari is shocked by his decline in status and finds work at the local newspaper. Daphne is in India because all her family have died during the war and she can't volunteer anymore as an ambulance driver due to a heart condition and has been shipped off to her last living relative. Despite their differences love blossoms between Hari and Daphne and you think, I could really enjoy watching these characters for the next fourteen episodes defying the odds and finding a place for themselves in this world. Then after two of the fourteen episodes they make love only to be brutally attacked in the aftermath with Daphne being repeatedly raped. Hari's imprisoned and tortured for presumably being the rapist while Daphne ends up pregnant and dies in childbirth. After the third episode we're concentrating on an entirely different cast and the viewer is left with whiplash. Because they were obviously punished for daring to love outside the bounds of "proper society." This happens again and again. There's Barbie Batchelor, a queer coded disaffected missionary who is driven to madness because the object of her affection died by self-immolation. So we have two gays to bury in quick succession. Then there's Ahmed Kasim, the love child of Regé-Jean Page and Jason Momoa, who dies because he was making eyes at a white woman. The biggest "transgressor" though is Tim Pigott-Smith's Ronald Merrick. He is not only a closeted homosexual, but he dons brownface to get down with his bad self. Again, he is brutally killed. Although I would argue that he totally deserved it. This miniseries is so full of hate against the other that I don't know how anyone could like it. Sure, the scenery is amazing, the locations are to die for, but I don't actually want to see people die for them. This weird moral center is thrown off even more by the fact that if you're a woman who gets knocked up, well, as long as it's with an attractive white male, that's totally cool, even if you decide to have an abortion. I just don't get it. Was The Jewel in the Crown popular because the English love to relive the glory days of Empire and this shows that when they left everything went to shit? I honestly just don't get it. I was so looking forward to watching this show but slogging through thirteen hours of this hate just broke me. How can anyone watch this more than once let alone the rumored yearly viewing parties? Please, if there's something I'm missing please tell me because this is just hate on hate on hate and I hate it.
I have always loved epic stories set in India. Indian Summers tapped into that on many levels. Set during the waning days of the British Raj, there's a sense that the party was winding down and these characters were grasping for whatever they could get, leading them to, more often than not, make disastrous choices. The show has very little in the way of plot other than lots of romantic obstacles, but the stellar cast makes up for any plot defects. Come one people, Julia Walters! Not to mention Patrick Malahide, Nikesh Patel, Art Malik, Blake Ritson, and Craig Parkinson. I could just watch them wander the lanes between their precious club and their homes for hours on end. The insufferable heat they were trying to escape by summering in Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, is palpable onscreen and made me feel like I was there. I know there are a lot of people who took issue with the show, primarily due to the fact that instead of actually filming in India they filmed in Penang, Malaysia, and, well, you can tell, but it still succeeded in creating that atmosphere of suffocating and insufferable British superiority where they refuse to dress for the climate because that wouldn't be British. I can even see them sitting around set declaring themselves to be in India when they were not. I do wish the show had been given a chance to play out over the intended five seasons, because they started moving more into the political upheavals that were on the horizon in India with Gandhi and contrasting his power with that of the Raj with the introduction of Art Malik as the Maharajah of Amritpur in season two. A change was in the wind and the cracks really started to show in season two and then it just ended! And what about the romance between Alice and Aafrin! The series ends with a potential happy ending for the mixed race couple, but would that have actually lasted if the show went on for three more seasons? Or did they shoehorn this in to give the audience some kind of happy ending even though anyone who has any sense of history would know how hard the life they chose would be in 1935. Also would the show have tackled World War II? But I have to settle with what we got, a slice of life, not perfect, but very atmospheric.
