Having committed Happy Valley's Catherine Cawood to the annals of TV's trailblazing women, we might have thought Sally Wainwright would still be basking in the glow of universal praise for her Yorkshire epic.
Instead, Wainwright's only gone and done it again with a new heroine to root for at the heart of her swaggering 18th-century period drama Renegade Nell. Nell Jackson – Nell, not Nelly – has the arch, quick-witted sass of any of the Walford women, mixed with an impossible knack for kicking her detractors to the curb. Literally.
Nell is played by Louisa Harland, in quite a gear shift from kooky Orla in Derry Girls. She's a young widower turned highwaywoman robber – that last bit instils real fear in the male population once they start to get wind of it – who is periodically granted supernatural powers.
She's helped by a miniature Nick Mohammed, no longer wearing his Ted Lasso salt and pepper wig, as the mystical sprite Billy Blind. Whenever Nell's attacked in the tavern or on the carriageways, Billy zooms into her mouth like a pesky fly to bestow her with the might of a thousand men and the kickassery of Buffy Summers.
The new Disney+ show unspools a tale of action, adventure, fantasy and the supernatural into eight jaunty and tremendously fun episodes. When Nell returns home from the front of war-torn Europe with these secret newfound powers, she soon finds herself framed for murder and goes on the lam with her sisters. Naturally, hijinks ensue.
It's easy to get caught up in Renegade Nell: the carefully choreographed fight sequences are a delight. Nell bending out of reach of bullets or pistol-whipping a troupe of highwaymen is set to a gripping choral score that conjures Pirates of the Caribbean in one scene and then Gladiator in another. This is the House of Mouse x Wainwright, and directed by Sex Education's Ben Taylor, so the production value is superb.
Nell is disarming from the first scene and Harland embodies her completely. Without that convincing central performance, this would likely fray at its aloof genre seams. More on that later.
She's complemented nicely with a rogues' gallery of nasty toffs. There's Thomas Blancheford (Jake Dunn), a lecherous nepo baby who makes a Faustian pact with an even more dastardly Earl of Poynton (Adrian Lester), dabbler in the dark arts.
Both are suitably evil – Dunn in particular has mastered the frightening art of holding nothing behind his eyes. There's a good bait-and-switch with his widowed sister Sofia Wilmot (Alice Kremelberg), who might actually be the worse of the two.
On the side of good, Nell is helped by the jaunty and equally mischievous highway robber Charles Devereux (Frank Dillane). Meanwhile, Mohammed is somewhat wasted in the shrunken realm of CGI. They might have made him a couple of gradations bigger, since we often can't make out the face of his fretting Tinkerbell.
Described by Disney+ as an action-adventure fantasy series, Renegade Nell hedges its genre bets a touch. The result can be tonally confusing. Halfway through the first episode our swashbuckling caper turns very suddenly to deep tragedy. It may be the pitfall of straddling the line between YA and adult drama.
Yet that tragedy is quite swiftly and bafflingly dispatched as we rollick on. At times plot points are done and undone on a dime. Perhaps this is part and parcel of the world of plunder, but there's no real sense of the stakes.
Once Nell realises she's destined for more than the life of a landlord's daughter, a subplot of class warfare takes shape to lend the shenanigans deeper significance. It's Nell vs Evil Aristos. We know who we would put our shilling on.
Renegade Nell is available to stream on Disney+ from March 29.
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Deputy TV Editor
Previously a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape for Digital Spy, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas.
When she's not bingeing a box set, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
