‘My Lady Jane’: Reveal Fatigue

If you were surprised that this delightful bon mot of warped history was canceled, you have a high tolerance for endless reveals.

NEW STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This newsletter aggressively spoils things.

This was my facial expression when a minor character up and turned into a bird in the first episode.

Fucking with history is fun. Imagining all manner of secret conspiracies, alternative explanations, and hidden histories is always a gas¹. And when you’re fucking with history, choosing the most obscure-yet-recognizable figures to distort and fictionalize is the key, making Lady Jane Grey a great choice. She’s pretty well-known in the sense that plenty of historical research has been spent on her, but she was Queen of England and Ireland for just nine days² and unless you’re a history nerd, survived AP History in high school, or just like reading about history you may not be terribly familiar with her. She’s the sort of historical figure whose Legacy section on their Wikipedia page is less than 300 words long, making her ideal for literary reinvention³.

Authors Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows had a lot of fun writing My Lady Jane, a novel that pivoted off that real history into a pretty wild re-imagining of the 16^th century, tossing in shape-shifting, secretly not-dead kings, and lots of snarky commentary. That brought a decidedly 21^st century attitude to a story about a 16-year old girl who was married, declared queen, and executed in a whirlwind of suffering and assholery⁴. The adaptation of the book on Amazon Prime should have been a wild success—it brought the spirit of the books to the screen with some fidelity, it cast extremely pretty people in key roles⁵, and it breezed along with decent production values.

It was canceled after one season. A season that failed to capture much attention, if my wizened understanding of the pop culture-verse can be trusted⁶. There weren’t a lot of thinky pieces about it, I didn’t see it appear on some lazy writer’s list of “X Shows Fans of Not Having to Pay Attention Will Love⁷” or anything, is what I mean. There was no buzz or chatter.

And now it’s gone. There are likely a lot of reasons for its failure to catch on. The tone might have been too arch and breezy. Lady Jane Grey may have been a bit too much of a historical footnote for a broad audience. The shape-shifting stuff may have been one step too far after you’ve already re-written history more or less entirely. But I think it’s a little deeper than that: This was an example of exhausting Endless Surprise Writing where everyone has at least one reveal.

I Know a Salty Little Badger Who Likes a Tickle

This show is what literary folks call “spicy” which is the hifalutin’ way of saying horny.

Reveals are fun! The word reveal implies something like a magic trick, and who doesn’t like a magic trick⁸? Handled well, a reveal is a transformative moment when the reader or viewer suddenly understands that they have been fooled in the best way. But a constant string of reveals starts to corrode the narrative, because it implies not so much a carefully planned surprise as a writer just making stuff up as they go. As a writer who definitely makes up stuff as he goes, I can tell you that the key here is to craft the illusion that you’re not just making stuff up, so too many reveals undermines that⁹.

My Lady Jane has a lot of reveals. First of all, part of the baked-in universe stuff is that part of the population are shapeshifters who can turn into animals, called Ethians, who are violently oppressed, tortured, and killed by the non-shifting Verities who rule everything¹⁰. So naturally just about any character can turn out to be a secret Ethian, and plenty of them do. The fourth or fifth time someone who’s supposed to be a Verity surprises you by transforming into a boar or an owl and you kind of lose the magic.

Next are the sloppy heel turns, which also come pretty fast and furious. When Jane (Emily Bader) first meets her future brother-in-law, Stan (Henry Ashton), he’s a ludicrously overwritten prick abusing young urchins for his amusement. He’s painted to be a complete asshole in the early going—as is his father, Lord Dudley (Rob Brydon)¹¹. Don’t worry though; before too many episodes have gone by they’re both revealed to be actually pretty good fellas who care deeply about the other Dudley, Jane’s husband Guildford (Edward Bluemel), who is secretly an Ethian but can’t control his transformation.

These reveals go on (and on): Jane’s mother is written as a villain, but is revealed to simply be determined to survive in a male-dominated and violent world. King Edward VI is not only not as dead as you might think, he might be an Ethian too, and he comes to regret all the anti-Ethian legislation he’s signed. About the only characters who remain consistent are Queen Mary (Kate O’Flynn) and her odious minister Lord Seymour (Dominic Cooper), who are so flamboyantly evil you keep expecting them to start dancing about singing “Evil evil evil! I DO SO LOVE BEING EVIL!¹²”

Ahem. Believe it or not, I kind of liked this show.

Reveal Thyself

There is some tomfoolery afoot in this show.

The problem with so many reveals is twofold. On the one hand, every time you use the technique it erodes its impact. Eventually the reader or viewer is a just bored. Second, it makes the whole universe feel very unsettled. Your audience gets used to a character being one way, then not only do they change—which could be accomplished with, you know, character development and evolution¹³—but the suddenness of the change implies that they’ve always really been this way, and thus everything that has come before was a lie, or a fake-out¹⁴.

It’s a shame, really, because the show was actually great fun once you got over the fact that everyone in Tudor England had absolutely amazing teeth and not the crumbling yellow chalk those folks almost certainly actually did have¹⁵. Am I certain that casual viewers were somehow disturbed by the sheer number of reveals in a single season of a TV show? Of course not. As usual, I am relying on my own inherent brilliance and infallibility. Wait ... do you not?

NEXT WEEK: The unexpected heel turn of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

If you enjoy this newsletter, consider subscribing to my paid fiction Substack, Writing Without Rules: From the Notebook!

1. Also: Pretending that life centuries in the past wasn’t a horror show of filth, violence, and ignorant armies clashing and all that.

2. For a hint on how that went for her, note the fact that she is referred to as Lady Jane Grey and not, you know, Queen Jane Grey.

3. This is why I try to maintain my current levels of historical obscurity: To protect my mystery for future writers.

4. At least these days we have the decency to destroy people on social media, not cut off their heads.

5. My one great hope is that when they make a biopic about me they cast someone orders of magnitude hotter than me. I want to be remembered as George Clooney, not <gestures vaguely at himself> whatever this is.

6. Narrator: It cannot.

7. As a person who writes those lists from time to time, I feel the need to apologize for my role in the dumbering of America.

8. I always fall down rabbit holes of trying to figure out how the trick was done, so magic tricks are not only not entertaining to me, they are downright stressful and sometimes dangerous. Also, they remind me of this classic moment.

9. The key to selling a reveal or plot twist is to be just as surprised when you think of it as your reader will be when they read it.

10. Leading to the classic question: Why do the super-powered shape shifters not attack the weaker non-magical people and eat them? Are they stupid?

11. The best part about all this ludicrous stuff is that every time you think, well that character name is a bit too silly, isn’t it, joke’s on you because these were their real names.

12. I am split on whether the fact that every single aristocrat in the show’s universe is depicted as an idiot is politically purposeful or not. I will spend approximately zero mental energy pondering this.

13. Also: Magic. Which this universe has.

14. Just like when I pretend to find you fascinating until you buy me another drink, and then the mask comes off.

15. Seriously: Emily Bader looks like she goes to the dentist four times a week for a clean and polish.