mrs wilson | what to watch?

Mrs Wilson | BBC One | Tuesdays at 9pm

I feel like after the BBC’s The Cry aired its finale there was a little lull in good dramas featuring on the tele... until now that is. I can only assume it was to wait for the Christmas build-up, but nevertheless a decent drama is here. I was intrigued by Mrs Wilson from the advert that's been appearing over the last few weeks, but I underestimated just how much I would enjoy the first episode.

Within the first few moments of airing I just knew I was going to love it, I even tweeted about how beautifully shot the episode was. Something about the eras of and between the forties and sixties, alongside the sophistication of Ruth Wilson playing Mrs (Alison) Wilson herself made for a completely endearing and compelling episode.

As we were made aware of in the opening scenes, the story was based on true events: as people say, "Truth is often stranger than fiction.", and upon further research it appears that Ruth is portraying the truth of her Grandmother, who is the real-life Mrs Wilson (or at least one of!), which makes Mr Alec/Alexander Wilson her bigamist Grandfather. An entirely fascinating and incomprehensible story- one that is difficult to fathom yet nevertheless happened, with the families uncovering more truth as time goes on- it is a gift for tv drama that the family were so willing to share their story.

Moving away from the real life aspect of the story, although hard to forget, I must speak about it in terms of fiction for the sake of this recommendation/review. The first episode follows Alison Wilson after the death of her husband, and discovering that he was in fact married to multiple women and also had children with each and every wife. After discovering Alec's first wife, Alison tries to figure out how her husband managed to hide his secrets for so long, but with a history of working within the Secret Services, I'd imagine he had quite a bit of help.

Whilst Alison was lead to believe her husband was leading a double life with two wives and sets of families, the ending of the first episode reveals a third wife… Dorothy. I think we may have caught a little glimpse of Dorothy at the funeral, played by Keeley Hawes, so she was not so subtly camouflaged into the crowds of extras given how familiar we are with the actress. With the addition of Keeley Hawes to the already strong cast, who I assume will be the feature of episode two, I think we are in for a real treat this coming Tuesday.

I was a little sad to see that this series is only going to be three episodes long, but I feel that short and sweet may be the key to a successful and entirely captivating drama, as we’ve seen before with the series The Cry, which was only four episodes long. I have a good feeling about this drama and believe it is going to be one of the best we’ve seen throughout 2018, which is a big claim indeed. I’m very excited (and impatient!!) to be tuning into Mrs Wilson over the next two weeks to see how many wives Alec tallies up in total (haha only joking!), and to see how the story unfolds.

Please feel free to discuss your opinions on Mrs Wilson below or over on Twitter where I regularly tweet about and discuss my thoughts on tv shows. It would also be really great if you could like my Facebook page as I’ve only recently created it! My other socials are all linked in the header at the top of the page as usual.

Take care of yourselves, I’m sure we can all look forward to some brilliant tv over the Christmas countdown and festive period!

Ciao for now!