Television series

Fingersmith

Name: Fingersmith
Genre: Drama, Crime
Released: 2005
Cast: Sally Hawkins, Elaine Cassidy, Rupert Evans, Charles Dance, Imelda Staunton

Sarah Waters' Victorian con turned inside out: a petty thief planted in a country house to help swindle an heiress, until the story flips its own logic halfway through and asks you to re-read everything you thought you understood. Lush, tactile, unhurried, with Sally Hawkins and Elaine Cassidy circling each other with real heat. For anyone who wants their costume drama with teeth and a genuinely surprising structure.

TVMaze rating

4.0

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love a Victorian crime story that keeps tilting under your feet, where the pleasure is in trusting one character and then reconsidering everything, and the costume drama is a vehicle for sly, sharp plotting.

Skip it if you want a brisk, self-contained caper with clear heroes, since its pleasures come from slow deception, and its mood stays close, murky and uneasy for most of the way.

What it asks of you: Three hour-long episodes, so you give it a real evening or two, and you settle in for a patient, layered build rather than quick thrills, with plenty of lush period atmosphere.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Tipping the Velvet2002

Same novelist, same grimy-glamorous Victorian London, same appetite for desire that refuses to behave itself — if you loved Waters' voice here, this is where she first proved she had it.

But Broader and bawdier than Fingersmith, with a music-hall brashness that trades subtlety for sheer nerve.

Gentleman Jack2019

Suranne Jones is magnetic as a real 19th-century landowner who loves women openly and unapologetically — the same collision of class, money and queer desire, but played with wit instead of dread.

But It's warmer and funnier than Fingersmith ever gets, so if you wanted more menace, this will feel almost too kind.

The Crimson Petal and the White2011

A prostitute claws her way into polite society in gaslit London, and the show is just as interested in the machinery of class and sex underneath the corsets as Fingersmith is.

But Grimmer and considerably more explicit, and it withholds any of the romantic payoff you might be hoping for.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Fingersmith

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Gaslight1944

Fingersmith runs on a woman being convinced of a reality that isn't true so someone else can take what's hers; Gaslight coined the word for exactly that trick, decades before Waters wrote it into corsets.

A husband methodically convinces his wife she's losing her mind so he can get at what she owns — decades before Fingersmith, this is the original blueprint for manipulation dressed as love.

But Black-and-white 1940s pacing and its stage-play staginess will feel slow if what you want is contemporary momentum.

Bleak House2005

Dickens by way of a soap opera — quick cuts, cliffhangers every ten minutes, and a legal conspiracy as tangled as anything in Fingersmith's plot. Gillian Anderson is chilling.

But It's a much bigger, slower commitment — eight hours of legal fog before things properly pay off.

Affinity2008

Another Waters adaptation, this time about a lonely woman drawn into a suspicious relationship with a female medium in a Victorian prison — same slow unravelling of trust, condensed into a single film.

But Lower budget and less confident than the BBC's Waters adaptations, and the twist lands softer.

Taboo2017

Same filthy, candlelit London underworld a few decades later, with Tom Hardy as a man playing everyone against everyone else for an inheritance he's owed. Pure nasty pleasure.

But Far more violent and macho than anything here, and it trades tenderness for pure swagger.

Peaky Blinders2013

Different century, same appetite for family loyalty curdling into betrayal and cons run on people who trust you most — if you liked watching alliances shift, this delivers it at scale.

But Bigger, louder, and far more concerned with gangster spectacle than the kind of psychological subtlety Fingersmith trades in.

Oliver Twist2007

Goes back to the source of the thieves'-den London Fingersmith borrows its atmosphere from — pickpockets, fences, and a criminal family that functions like a twisted found household.

But Much more straightforwardly moralistic than Fingersmith, with none of its ambiguity about who really deserves sympathy.

Wolf Hall2015

Different court, different century, but the same pleasure in watching a sharp mind manoeuvre through a world built to crush anyone without power or name. Mark Rylance is extraordinary.

But Cerebral and political rather than sensual, so if it was the romance you wanted, this won't give it to you.

The Keepers2017

Fingersmith's asylum plot turns on a woman's testimony being erased because it's inconvenient to the powerful; The Keepers shows that exact machinery operating in the real world, within living memory, with no fictional safety net.

A true-crime documentary about nuns, a murdered teacher, and decades of institutional silence used to bury an inconvenient woman's story — the exact mechanism Fingersmith uses fiction to dramatize, except here it actually happened.

But Nonfiction, contemporary, and genuinely upsetting in ways a costume drama can cushion you from — no corsets to soften this one.

Wild Things1998

Both stories are built around a rug-pull at the midpoint that forces you to re-read everything before it — Fingersmith just wears a corset while Wild Things wears sunscreen and bad intentions.

A trashy Florida noir where every character turns out to be running a con on every other character, and the film keeps rewinding after the credits to reveal the next layer of the lie. Pure structural nerve.

But Deliberately trashy and horny in a way Fingersmith never is — this is pulp, not prestige, and it knows it.