As far as history lessons go, Taboo might be the most interesting class on 19th century English inheritance law and international corporate politics you'll ever take. And it's hardly the course you'd ever expect to be taught by a scarred, tattooed man who replaces lectures with grunts and brooding stares. But that's what you get in the first three episodes of Taboo that were made available to critics. While at every turn of a dark London corner, Taboo promises a deeper mystery; the first few hours of this threatening period drama, however, are dedicated to watching old, white men discuss legal documents in board rooms.
Thankfully, there's Tom Hardy, who plays lead character James Delaney, and who created the show with his father Chips Hardy and writer and producer Steven Knight (the man behind the similarly dark British period piece Peaky Blinders). There are few people who could give a presentation about the nuanced international relations of the War of 1812 and make it as tense and terrifying as Hardy. Delaney is a part time adventurer, heir, soldier, spy, and lawyer who returns to London after a 10-year absence to find his father has been murdered.
Taboo, then, is essentially a revenge tale that gets tied up in a narrative about the corporate dealings of the East India Company. Delaney, it seems, has acquired a plot of land called Nootka Sound, which is a key territory in the war between the British and Americans, along with a necessary holding for the powerful East India Company. There are ledgers, there are logs, there are maps, there are wills, there are marriage licenses—so many documents! And Hardy's slow-burn performance almost makes it worth sitting through so many business meetings attended by the British elite. If you're patient enough to sit through scenes of Delaney digging through his father's estate, you'll occasionally be rewarded by watching Hardy explode and threaten some posh British bureaucrat.
But Delaney also has a mysterious past—it's a dark, brooding period drama, after all—and that's precisely where Taboo's central problem with race comes in. It involves something about his time in Africa, which vaguely has to do with tribal spiritualism and some disaster that befell a slave ship. It's awkwardly woven into the narrative through uncomfortable PTSD flashbacks, and rumors of Delaney's presumed cannibalism and dabbling in the dark magic practiced by the "savages" in Africa.
Taboo portrays the upperclass of 19th century London, a group largely influenced by the xenophobia of British imperialism. It's jarring—and puzzling—when some of Delaney's peers in London use the N-word when referring to him in conversation for his embrace of African culture. This probably comes with the territory of setting a drama in a particularly intolerant time in history. But Taboo's problems extend deeper to Hardy as the show's central actor. Delaney's mother is apparently a woman whom his father purchased along with Nootka—meaning Hardy, a white man, plays a character of mixed race. In that lies the catch-22: Hardy's presence in the show dilutes any greater conversation about race, but Hardy's performance is its driving force of the series.
None of this, along with the grotesque violence/makeup and lofty melodrama, make Taboo easy to watch. Not even often-stunning performances from Jonathan Pryce, David Hayman, Nicholas Woodeson, Roger Ashton-Griffiths, and Oona Chaplin (who plays his half-sister/love interest, which is also pretty gross) can dig Taboo out of its messy, overwrought darkness.
As an eight-episode miniseries, Taboo still has much—OK, all—of its mysteries still to reveal. If many of its flaws don't immediately turn you off, maybe Hardy's compelling intensity is enough to drag Taboo through to the finish line. If not, maybe a few people will learn something after reading the War of 1812 and East India Company Wikipedia pages in an effort to keep up.
