England is grey. It’s damp. The year is 1806, and magic is a dead hobby for dusty gentlemen who only read books about it. Then, a grumpy hermit named Gilbert Norrell makes the statues in York Minster speak. Suddenly, magic isn't just for libraries anymore.
You’ve probably seen plenty of fantasy shows. Dragons, chosen ones, the usual. But the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell TV series is something else entirely. It’s a seven-part BBC masterpiece that somehow flew under the radar despite being one of the most ambitious things ever put on a screen. Honestly, if you missed it back in 2015, you’re missing the smartest "period drama" ever made.
What Most People Get Wrong About the Story
People hear "BBC period drama" and think of tea, corsets, and polite yearning in gardens. While there’s plenty of that, this show is actually a horror story in disguise.
It’s about the Napoleonic Wars, but with a twist. The British government decides to use magic to fight the French. Imagine ships made of sand rising out of the ocean or magical illusions tricking entire armies. It sounds cool, right? But the magic here has a price. It’s dirty, it’s wild, and it’s deeply connected to a terrifying fairy realm called Lost-Hope.
Basically, the show centers on the friction between two men. Mr. Norrell (played with a brilliant, twitchy pettiness by Eddie Marsan) wants magic to be respectable. He wants it controlled, academic, and safe. Then comes Jonathan Strange (Bertie Carvel). Strange is young, intuitive, and dangerously talented. He doesn't want to just read about magic; he wants to do it. This isn't just a student-teacher dynamic. It's a clash of worldviews that eventually tears their lives apart.
📖 Related: Alfonso Cuarón: Why the Harry Potter 3 Director Changed the Wizarding World Forever
The Problem With the "Gentleman"
The real villain isn't Napoleon. It’s the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair.
Marc Warren plays this role with a chilling, floaty menace. He’s a fairy, but not the Tinkerbell kind. He’s a high-functioning sociopath who abducts people to make them dance at his eternal balls in a decaying mansion. When Norrell strikes a deal with him to resurrect a cabinet minister’s wife, he accidentally invites a nightmare into England.
The show handles this beautifully. You see the gradual decay of the characters—Lady Pole (Alice Englert) and Stephen Black (Ariyon Bakare)—who are trapped in the Gentleman's world while their bodies remain in the real one. They can’t speak about their torment; it comes out as gibberish. It’s heartbreaking.
Why the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell TV series Looks Different
Most fantasy shows today rely on massive CGI landscapes that feel a bit hollow. Director Toby Haynes took a different route. He used a muted, desaturated color palette. Everything feels heavy and tactile. When Strange conjures horses out of sand on a beach to stop a French invasion, the effects still hold up perfectly in 2026.
👉 See also: Why the Cast of Hold Your Breath 2024 Makes This Dust Bowl Horror Actually Work
Why? Because the magic feels like it has weight.
- The sets are real Yorkshire stone and muddy London streets.
- The costumes by Barbara Kidd are historically pinpoint-accurate for the Regency era.
- The wigs—especially Norrell’s—are deliberately old-fashioned to show how out of touch he is.
They filmed in Yorkshire, Canada, and Croatia. This gave the series a sprawling, epic feel that you usually only get in big-budget movies. Screenwriter Peter Harness managed to condense Susanna Clarke's 800-page "breeze-block" of a novel into seven hours without losing the soul of the book. He even kept the footnotes! Well, not literally on the screen, but he woven those world-building details into the dialogue so naturally you don't realize you're being "taught" the history of English magic.
Differences From the Book (And Why They Work)
If you’ve read the book, you know it’s famous for its dry, Jane Austen-style wit and those endless, fascinating footnotes. The TV show is a bit more emotional.
The relationship between Jonathan and his wife, Arabella (Charlotte Riley), is given much more screen time. In the book, Jonathan can seem a bit cold, almost empathy-deficient. On screen, Bertie Carvel makes him more sympathetic. You feel his grief when things go wrong. Some purists hated this, but honestly, for a TV drama, you need that emotional anchor.
✨ Don't miss: Is Steven Weber Leaving Chicago Med? What Really Happened With Dean Archer
Also, the character of Lady Pole gets a lot more agency. In the novel, she’s a tragic figure who mostly suffers in silence. In the series, Alice Englert gives her a fiery, desperate energy. She feels like a person fighting back against her magical imprisonment, which makes the stakes feel much higher.
How to Actually Watch It Today
This isn't a show you can just put on in the background while you fold laundry. You have to pay attention. The plot is dense. The names of old magicians like the Raven King and John Uskglass are dropped constantly. If you blink, you’ll miss how a minor character in episode two becomes the key to the finale.
- Find the Blu-ray if you can. The cinematography is so detailed that streaming compression sometimes ruins the dark, moody scenes in Lost-Hope.
- Commit to the first two episodes. The first hour is a bit slow because it’s setting up the Regency social world. By episode three, when Strange goes to the Peninsular War, the pace explodes.
- Watch the background. The show uses "mirror magic" frequently. Often, what’s happening in a reflection is different from what’s happening in the room.
The Legacy of English Magic
There hasn't been a second season, and there likely never will be. The story is a complete arc. It ends on a note that is both satisfying and hauntingly open-ended.
It explores themes that are still relevant: the danger of hoarding knowledge, the arrogance of empires, and the cost of obsession. Mr. Norrell’s desire to "own" magic is a perfect metaphor for how we handle technology and information today. He’d rather magic stay dead than have it exist in a way he can’t control.
The Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell TV series remains a high-water mark for the BBC. It proved that you could make "prestige" fantasy that didn't rely on dragons or massive battles to be gripping. It relied on character, atmosphere, and a very British kind of dread.
If you want to dive deeper into this world, the best next step is to pick up the original novel by Susanna Clarke or her follow-up collection of short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu. These stories flesh out the folklore of the Raven King and provide more context for the weird, wild magic that the show only hints at. Reading the book after seeing the show is a rare treat because you can finally understand all those "in-jokes" the characters make about 14th-century sorcerers.