Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Essex Serpent’ On Apple TV+, Where Claire Danes Plays A Widow Chasing A Mythical Sea Serpent In Victorian Essex

Why we’re so fascinated with mythical serpents and monsters is anyone’s guess. To some people, pursuing the Loch Ness Monster is equivalent to worshiping an all-knowing being in the sky. That’s part of the message explored in The Essex Serpent, an adaptation of a 2016 novel that takes place in Victorian-era Essex.

THE ESSEX SERPENT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An overview of a swampy delta in the British county of Essex. A girl holding a cross and making incantations wades into a marsh, with her sister screaming after her.

The Gist: In London, Dr. Luke Garrett (Frank Dillane) makes a house call to Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes), whose husband is slowly being strangled by throat cancer. Dr. Garrett offers to do a surgical procedure to ease the pressure on her husband’s throat, but he refuses. He dies overnight.

While she is grieving, Cora also remembers the abuse her domineering husband heaped on her; as she has conversations with Dr. Garrett, she finds that she has a strong desire to pursue her interests. So she decides to vacation in a seaside town in Essex with her son and her companion Martha (Hayley Squires) and search for a once-mythical sea serpent; reports have been coming out from the area of serpent sightings.

On her first day, she helps out Will Ransome (Tom Hiddleston), the local vicar who lives in Aldwinter, with a sheep that’s stuck in the swamp; he tells the tourist to not bother trying to look for the serpent, like everyone else who has come to town. She doesn’t realize he’s the vicar until she formally visits his family, so he can show her around town. After apologizing for his rudeness the day before, he again tells Cora that the serpent doesn’t exist, and that the townspeople have conjured it up to help them cope with “our changing times.”

But the town is on edge over the disappearance of Gracie Banks (Rebecca Ineson). Her sister Naomi (Lily-Rose Aslandogdu) is convinced that the serpent took her, and as much as Will tries to discourage his parishioners about believing in the beast, a discovery made during his Sunday mass makes people think otherwise.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In time period and feel, The Essex Serpent comes close to the 2019 series Carnival Row.

Our Take: The Essex Serpent, adapted by Anna Symon from Sarah Perry’s 2016 novel and directed by Clio Barnard, has the murky look you might expect from a show about a mythical serpent that might be killing people in the Victorian era. The series gets off to an extremely slow start, however, taking a bit too much time to build the characters played by Danes and Hiddleston, to the detriment of the story’s pacing.

We were a bit skeptical of Danes playing Cora, especially when we learned that Kiera Knightly was originally slated to play her, but had to drop out before filming started. As we watched the first episode, though, we realized that she might have been a better choice, mainly because Cora needs that tiny bit of unhinged belief that Danes can bring to a role. We thoroughly bought her as a woman who is more in her element getting down in the dirt and chasing serpents, instead of being a prim London housewife whose husband burns her during sex.

Hiddleston plays the kind of handsome but stoic type he usually plays when he’s not playing Loki, and there certainly is chemistry between him and Danes. The idea that the two of them are going to romantically bond over the pursuit of this serpent, despite their opposite beliefs, will be one of the parts of the upcoming series we’ll look forward to.

We’re just not sure how fast it’s going to get there. Part of the story is that the townspeople will turn on Cora because they’ll think she brought the serpent, which likely means she’ll turn to Will for protection and comfort. But the first episode gets a bit too comfortable with the story of Luke’s desire to do heart surgery, which is setting up why he’ll move to Essex and compete with Will for Cora’s attention. There’s a lot of talking, but not a lot of story propulsion, which makes us wonder if a six-part series was the best way to present this novel.

Sex and Skin: Cora has nightmares about the violent sex she had with her husband.

Parting Shot: Gracie is found either dead or near-dead. As the town members surround her body, her father says, “The serpent got her.” Will and Cora exchange stares.

Sleeper Star: Hayley Squires is Martha, whose relation to Cora is a bit unclear. Is she a best friend, a relative, a lover? Either way, she is Cora’s support system, which keeps her from becoming completely insane with thoughts of the serpent.

Most Pilot-y Line: In a letter to Luke, Cora says “I still have your heart.” Luke thinks it means she likes him, not thinking that she might still have the slice of a heart he gave her as a weird gift.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re tentatively giving The Essex Serpent a recommendation because the performances of Danes, Hiddleston and the rest of the cast can overcome the series’ plodding pacing in parts. But we’re just not sure how many people are going to make it through all six episodes when it seems like the first one doesn’t do much to set up the story.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.