You are now logged in. Forgot your password? Available March Somewhere in the vast terrain between the hooker-as-fairytale-princess fantasy of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and the prim, grim Victorian sociology of Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Woman of the Streets lies Harlots , Hulu's odd but engrossing new drama about life inside an 18th-century London brothel. Screenwriter Moira Buffini, one of the five British women who produce, write, and direct Harlots , said in unveiling the project that the goal was "everything from the whore's-eye view.
There's plenty of nudity, of both sexes, but you've seen commercials for bladder medication that were sexier. The Harlots hookers don't make much money, but it's a living—and they regard the cops and and do-gooder moralists trying to close their house less as saviors than as a circling wolfpack. When a judge who's been asked to close the bordello as a public nuisance haughtily declares that "I grieve for the desperate women I have seen today who, faced with starvation, have sold their flesh," the prostitutes in the courtroom exchange looks laden with the unspoken question: " So you think we'll be better off in jail?
Harlots opens in with a prologue that claims a fifth of the women in London were hookers. That runs far ahead of police estimates of the day , but there's little doubt prostitution was a major industry.
One of the show's early scenes, in which the women amuse themselves by reading their own notices in a Consumer Reports -style guide to the various local hookers and their skill sets "one of the finest, fattest figures as fully finished for fun and frolick as fertile fancy ever formed…" is drawn from documented history.
The brothel at the heart of Harlots is operated by Margaret Wells Samantha Morton, nominated for an Oscar in as the troubled young immigrant mother of In America , a veteran of the trade whose virginity was bartered away for a pair of shoes at age 10 by her own mother. Margaret, buffeted by high rent and increasing graft demands by cops, hopes to get a much higher price for the maidenhead of her teenaged daughter Lucy British TV actress Eloise Smyth.
