While the visuals are not as grimy as some of the bleaker visions offered up on PBS’ “Masterpiece” series or otherwise, enough is made of Lydia’s higher standing and Margaret’s more working-class situation to understand the division and get a feel for the great leaps in society that better neighborhoods afford. What the series does best is make smaller characters from both brothels emerge as fully fledged people in short order. This is the unflinching worldview, and the characters are built from there. In this world of prostitution, quickies in back alleys and sex among people throwing up or starving is part of the norm. This “whore’s-eye view” of Georgian London tries to infuse some freshness in a tired genre.Ĭredit Harlots for, as previously mentioned, dispensing with the glamour within its first few frames. The series, co-produced with ITV in England, attempts to see the world as it really was, not through “the male gaze,” as its creators say. Some of the inspiration for Harlots comes from “Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies,” a ratings guide to prostitutes of the times.
“This city is made of our flesh - every beam, every brick. Sold by her own mother into prostitution at age 10 for a pair of shoes, she’s proud of having made a life for herself after that while still ashamed and internally tortured that she turned out Charlotte and is now taking bids for the virginity of her youngest daughter, Lucy (Eloise Smyth). Morton, who does a superb job as tough-minded madam Margaret, hell-bent on climbing the ladder to an equal height as rival Lydia Quigley, nails the emotional nuances of her character’s situation. Sex as power and opportunity - often the only opportunity - in 1763 is what the women behind Harlots keep hammering home.
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