Television series

Harlots

Name: Harlots
Genre: Drama, History
Released: 2017
Cast: Lesley Manville, Eloise Smyth, Kate Fleetwood, Bronwyn James, Holli Dempsey

Period drama

Harlots follows sex workers in 18th-century London with the gravity of a prestige drama and the propulsive energy of a revenge thriller. It's visceral and witty, angry about class and power, and refuses sentimentality. For anyone who wants historical drama with bite and women who scheme, fight, and survive on their own terms.

TVMaze rating

3.7

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you enjoy a sharp, character-driven period drama where ambitious women bargain, scheme and negotiate for power, and you prefer a cool, calculated tone to costume spectacle.

Skip it if you need brisk plot momentum; the pace is measured and many scenes linger on conversation and manoeuvring rather than action.

What it asks of you: Around an hour an episode across three seasons, so it asks for many evenings of steady attention and patience with a web of shifting alliances.

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

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Sarah Waters' Edwardian London through a woman's eyes and body: theatrical, sensual, propulsive. A coming-of-age story that refuses respectability and loves its own narrative excess.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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Peaky Blinders2013

Post-war Birmingham's criminal families operate by their own rules with Shakespearean grandeur. Seductive filmmaking, morally compromised characters, and the same appetite for style married to brutality.

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The Knick2014

Steven Soderbergh's New York hospital in the early 1900s, electric and grimy, where class, race, and medicine collide. Visually inventive and never condescending to its setting or characters.

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Gentleman Jack2019

Sally Wainwright's Yorkshire landowner in the 1830s, frank about desire and property and survival. Sunny compared to Harlots, but similarly interested in women's agency and economic power.

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The Essex Serpent2022

Victorian seaside town, a widow finding freedom and desire, local mythology and class resentment. Lush and strange, interested in how women move through the world when given room to.

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Post-Ripper 1890s Whitechapel through working detectives and the underworld they navigate. Gritty without being precious, focused on the structural inequality that breeds crime.

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Penny Dreadful2014

Victorian London populated with gothic monsters and damaged people. Theatrical and ambitious, treating pulp source material with genuine psychological weight and formal ambition.

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But Deliberately refuses conventional narrative logic. If you need clarity and resolution, this will frustrate you deeply. It's also much more formally avant-garde than Harlots.