Why ‘The Woman in White’ is perfect TV for the #MeToo generation
“How is it men crush women time and time again and go unpunished?” These words – spoken at the beginning of the first episode of the BBC’s The Woman in White – could easily have been uttered today. The occasionally on-the-nose dialogue from Jessie Buckley’s character mostly serves to show us how little has changed since 1859, when the original novel was published. The show begins with Walter Hartright encountering a distressed young woman named Anne Catherick, who fortunately for the title is wearing white. Hartright then takes up a teaching post with the Fairlie family, one of whom bears a striking resemblance to Anne. We dispense with the nice but boring Hartright early on and follow the far more engaging Fairlie sisters. Younger sister Laura is betrothed to the sinister Sir Percy (doesn’t quite twirl his moustache, but you get the feeling he really wants to), who is hiding a secret. As the show progresses, we watch in increasing bewilderment as the sisters are manipulated by an alliance of Very Bad Men (capitalization deliberate). Despite being frequently over-the-top, the timeliness of this new adaptation cannot be overlooked. The themes of domestic abuse, an early attempt at gaslighting before it became a thing, and an unusually well-balanced cast in terms of gender remind us of how far we have come as a society and how far we still have to go. The best period dramas ask questions about the world today by painting a picture of how things used to be and this is where The Woman in White really excels.
Streaming and Accessibility Today
The five-episode miniseries first reached U.S. viewers on PBS in 2018. Today it streams on the PBS Masterpiece Amazon Channel, Tubi with ads, and The Roku Channel with ads, giving new audiences easy entry points. The availability keeps the story’s questions about power and silence in circulation without requiring a cable subscription or a library loan.
Later Career Paths of the Cast
Jessie Buckley has moved from this early television turn into major film and stage roles that showcase the same intensity she brought to Marian Halcombe. Joanna Scanlan, who received limited material here, has since taken on richer parts in After Love, The Larkins, Slow Horses, and the upcoming Riot Women. Ben Hardy and Olivia Vinall have also maintained steady film and television work, showing how a single prestige project can serve as a career checkpoint rather than a finish line.
Adaptation Choices and Changes from the Novel
The series condenses the sprawling book into five hours and introduces a new character, Erasmus Nash, to tighten the narrative. Count Fosco appears more overtly menacing and less comic than in the text, while Sir Percival is rendered more explicitly cruel. These adjustments sharpen the focus on systemic manipulation and reduce the Victorian comic relief that once softened the villains.
Ongoing Legacy of Wilkie Collins Adaptations
A new eight-episode Russian miniseries aired in May 2026, proving that Collins’s plot still travels across borders and decades. The novel’s structure—multiple narrators exposing hidden crimes—lends itself to contemporary screen formats that prize perspective and withheld information. Each fresh version tests how much the original’s warnings about property, marriage, and silence still resonate.
The Woman in White aired in 2018 and remains available on streaming, yet its core argument has not aged into irrelevance. The Fairlie sisters’ ordeal still mirrors documented patterns of financial control and psychological coercion that advocacy groups track today. Period drama works best when it refuses to treat the past as costume only, and this adaptation keeps that contract intact. Joanna Scanlan’s later work in The Larkins and Riot Women supplies a useful counterpoint to the earlier complaint about underused talent; the industry occasionally circles back and corrects its own oversights. Viewers who return to the series now can measure both the story’s endurance and the incremental shifts in how stories of abuse are told and received.
