‘Outrageous' proves the travails of the Mitford family are as timely as ever

And what lives they are. Nancy is a novelist, unusual enough in the era, and especially close to her sister Diana (Joanna Vanderham), who's married, boredly, to a kind and wealthy heir to the Guinness beer fortune. Diana has done what all six daughters of the Mitford family are meant to do, and married well. Widely praised as a beauty, she and Nancy are popular socialites, despite their baron father's shrinking fortune.
Diana startles everyone by falling deeply in love with Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse), the head of the British Union of Fascists. What's more, she divorces her husband to be with him, then courts scandal for years while Mosley, a cad, delays their marriage (in part because he's having an affair with his dead wife's sister. He's a pretty wretched person all around). But her connection to Mosley leads their younger sister Unity (Shannon Watson) to develop a deep and horrifying affinity for fascism, and in particular for Adolf Hitler, who she manages to meet socially while at finishing school in Munich.
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So that's three sisters down. We've also got Jessica (Zoe Brough), who sees starving people protesting a ball she's attending with her family during the Depression and promptly grows a political and moral conscience, developing a fascination with communism and a concurrent interest in a similarly rebellious and coincidentally quite handsome cousin. You can also think of her as This Woman Is Absolutely Right and Why Isn't Anyone Listening to Her.
Second eldest Pamela (Isobel Jesper-Jones), sole brother Tom (Toby Regbo), and youngest sister
Why did the family split like this? As their father (James Purefoy) bemoans to their mother (Anna Chancellor), he's normal and she's normal, but 'each one of these girls is more perverse than the other.' He's not wrong.
The series has a light tone that contrasts sharply with its bleak subject matter (expect a jazzy soundtrack to intrude on scene changes), but that's also how the family experienced what happened. They were all living what they thought were parallel lives, until it became painfully clear that they weren't. At a time when many people's family members are supporting causes they find morally repugnant, the Mitford family, for all their wealth and distance from the present day, may bear more familiarity than we'd like.
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Before sneaking back to his room, he tells Nancy she looks old when she frowns. Nancy's frown deepens. September 1933 Diana and Unity attend Hitler's rally at Nuremberg. It makes a deep impression on both, but Unity is completely enraptured. As wedding preparations begin, Deborah begs Nancy to make her a bridesmaid. Nancy tells her that if she makes Deborah one, she has to make all of them bridesmaids. She (and Farve) can't afford five dresses. She bemoans how poor she and Peter are. Jessica fumes that she's not poor compared to most people in the country. She rants about how unfair the distribution of wealth is. RELATED: Read our My Lady Jane recaps Unity returns home from her trip with Diana. That night, Nancy overhears her regaling Jessica and Deborah with tales of the Nuremberg rally. Shocked, she insists Deborah leave so she isn't infected by Unity's Nazi-love. Left alone, Unity confides in Jessica that attending the rally inspired her. 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It's Horses Versus Magic Doors in THE LIBRARIANS: THE NEXT CHAPTER Episode 6 Sneak Peek Diana lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she invests her time and energy in teaching, writing, parenting, and indulging her love of all Trek and a myriad of other fandoms. She is a lifelong fan of smart sci-fi and fantasy media, an upstanding citizen of the United Federation of Planets, and a supporter of AFC Richmond 'til she dies. Her guilty pleasures include female-led procedurals, old-school sitcoms, and Bluey. She teaches, knits, and dreams big. You can also find her writing at The Televixen, Women at Warp, TV Fanatic, and TV Goodness.