Scandalous society sisters’ saga still enthrals

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/06/2025 (401 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Outrageous (now streaming on BritBox, with new episodes dropping on Tuesdays) is the story of the Mitford sisters, six aristocratic Englishwomen whose lives overlapped with a who’s-who of 20th-century history in a fashionable flurry of weddings, divorces, betrayals and scandals.

Some cultural commentators have attempted to explain why Mitford mania is still relevant today by comparing the sisters to the Kardashians, which is catchy but misleading. Yes, both sibling sets have a knack for grabbing tabloid headlines and a talent for picking terrible men.

But if one is really looking for relevance in Outrageous, the most relatable scene for many 2025 viewers might be the Christmas dinner where the Mitford girls’ mother (Anna Chancellor) tells them to stop arguing about Hitler and just pass the Brussels sprouts.

What really makes the Mitford saga so crushingly current is its collision of ordinary family life (well, sort of ordinary — the Mitfords were an eccentric lot) with polarizing politics. Coming of age in the 1930s, in a world that seems on the verge of violence and collapse, the sibs take up entrenched and irreconcilable political positions, testing their sisterly bonds and taking the “let’s agree to disagree” stance to its absolute limits.

Now that feels contemporary.

This soapy, splashy six-episode series is never subtle, but then neither were its subjects. The messy adolescent bedroom of Unity (Shannon Watson) and Jessica (Zoe Brough) features swastikas and pictures of the Fuhrer on one side and images of Marx, Lenin and the hammer and sickle on the other. This is not the scriptwriters creating an overly obvious image of a house divided: This was the sisters’ actual décor. (In real life, they drew a chalk line down the centre.)

Outrageous initially presents these two sisters’ ideological differences as awkward comedy, as in a scene in which Unity is vigorously Sieg Heiling on the well-rolled lawn of the family’s ancestral home while Jessica lounges nearby, reading The Daily Worker.

But things get more serious, more world-historical, when Unity travels to Munich, eventually gaining entry into Hitler’s inner circle, while Jessica becomes enamoured with her cousin Esmond Romilly, a communist who has gone off to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

Meanwhile, another emotional and political rift is developing between Diana (Joanna Vanderham), the beauty of the family, and Nancy (Bessie Carter), “the clever one.” After Diana leaves a safe society marriage to begin an affair with Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse), the black-shirted leader of the British Union of Fascists, Nancy — the writer who will become known for The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate — pens the 1935 comic novel Wigs on the Green.

The book satirizes a fictionalized version of Mosley’s movement as silly, self-important and ineffectual, and even though Nancy defends it as “meaningless fun,” as “froth,” Diana is furious.

The eventual fate of Wigs on the Green hints at some of the problems with Outrageous. After the war, Nancy Mitford declined to reprint the book. There was “nothing funny about fascists,” she suggested.

Likewise, the series can feel confused as it deals with its political clashes and with the very Mitfordian overlap of private life and public events.

Sometimes the show plays as a good-looking comic romp, with its posh frocks, jaunty jazz-age songs and seemingly endless supply of champagne.

Sometimes it plays as melodrama, with the Mitford girls’ rivalries, resentments and deep love given poignant expression.

And then, whoa, suddenly we’re at the Nuremberg Rally with Unity and Diana.

Not surprisingly, Outrageous has a tricky time handling these tonally disparate parts.

The show struggles to convey the weight of wider world events, but it does understand the divided dinner table. What will resonate for many viewers, what will make the leap from the 1930s to today, are the smaller, intimate conflicts of family members who love each other but can’t stand each other’s politics.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca