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Boston Globe

‘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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement Lisa Weidenfeld can be reached at