The Confessions Of Frannie Langton is a new period drama on BritBox coming out just in time to fill the MASTERPIECE hiatus gap. The story takes place in 1826 London (after Sanditon but before the main action in The Long Song) with flashbacks to earlier in Jamaica. The four-part miniseries is a twisting mystery touching on the intersections of race, class, gender, and identity in late Regency England.
Frannie Langton (Karla Simone-Spence) stands accused of murdering her former employer Madame Benham (Sophie Cookson) and her husband George Benham (Stephen Campbell Moore) but Frannie is convinced she didn’t do it. The circumstantial evidence points to Frannie as the main suspect, but the truth of her life and the events right before the murders is much more complicated than the simple story the police and courts want to believe. Frannie is a queer Black woman at a time when there are multiple social and political barriers to her being treated equally. Not only is Frannie feeling guilty about recent events, but she is also worried that the details of her troubled past are coming back to haunt her.
The road towards producing the miniseries began in 2019 when author Sara Collins published her novel of the same name. At the time of publication, Black British women protagonists were rare in historical fiction and even rarer in historical mystery novels. The novel was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.
The shift towards diversifying period dramas has greatly benefited Collins as there’s now room on the screen for both racebent stories such as Bridgerton and stories that seek to recreate real people and events from Black British history, as The Confessions of Frannie Langton is seeking to do. In this GBH Drama exclusive, we spoke to Collins about the process of moving from the page to the screen and what makes the protagonist stand out from other period drama heroines:
GBH Drama: Was there any opposition in terms of the production process or pitching process towards showing Frannie's story as a story of intersectionality in the Regency adjacent era?
Sarah Collins: Not in the pitching process. It was gobbled up. There was so much interest, there was so much support. It was really important for me to be involved during the production process because I did have to advocate. There are questions that will be familiar to women of color who engage in creative industries, especially in film and television production, where what might be shorthand for us has to be explained to other people. You really have to advocate to get away from stereotypes and to stop portraying the same old images. [There are also] views or emotions that people will take for granted that we know have to be conveyed in more refreshing, nuanced, or sensitive ways.
For example, everyone gets the anger when you talk about a Black woman being angry. But I find that I also have to still spend time conveying the idea that there is tenderness and vulnerability in this character as well, which people have been programmed not to expect in Black women. I think it's still a shame that we have to be advocating and explaining and perhaps teaching those things. But it is also a privilege that I don't take for granted to be in the room to make those arguments. I think it's still necessary. I wouldn't have wanted to give this story over to be made by people who did not understand that at their core.
When you were working on the screenplay, what was the most difficult thing you had to let go of or had to edit or switch around because it wouldn't work on the screen versus on the page?
The page is limitless. I only appreciated how much power novelists have when I started trying to adapt this novel, because I could put anything on the page, there was nothing limiting it. Your imagination can go where it will in a novel. I had to be very aware when adapting this of things like budget and location, where are we going to be able to access and how long are we going to have for filming. But also, the novel is really focused on what happens in one woman's head. And that was very important because the novel is in part about the experience of having your intelligence suppressed and having your desire suppressed. You can only get access to that by going inside the character. So the million-dollar question is, how do you put that on screen?
For me, there were two reasons I think it worked. One was that we got really lucky in casting Karla [Simone-Spence], who I think is just really exceptional. She's such a gifted actor, and she really got the nuance and the subtlety and the complexity of this character and she's able to convey it. It's not just about the words on the page, it's about her presence and her body language, and her expressions. And all of that comes together and goes towards building the character together with the words. The other thing is that we had to rely a bit on voiceover, but voiceover, I believe, works in the same way as it does in the recent The Handmaid's Tale adaptation. This is a voiceover that's supposed to give you access to what a character is thinking in a context where you're portraying a society that believes she ain't supposed to be thinking at all. They [the patriarchy] think there's nothing in there. [Frannie has to be] relatively placid on the surface at times, but all of it's happening inside her head. I hope we succeeded because those were, I think, the keys to bringing what was really important in the novel across to the screen.
In translating the book to the screen, was there any additional research you had to conduct?
No, it was all in there by osmosis. The book took me years to write and go through the editing and publication process. I immersed myself in the research that was needed both for Jamaica and England during the time period. It has become part of my DNA, it stays with me, and it stayed with me in the TV series. What was more important for me in the TV series, but for both the book and the TV series, [the story] is not about teaching people first and foremost.
For me, it's about getting people to feel and to identify with this character, Frannie, who's a really compelling, complicated, and I hope intriguing woman. I was much more focused in particular when we came to adapt the novel for television in her story, which doesn't require any research. Her story is about universal human emotion. It's really about desire, love, sensuality, passion, intelligence, and anger. I have felt [all of those emotions] which connected me very electrically to this character, and there's no research required for that.
Although Frannie Langton is a fictional character, where do you see her place in Black British history?
My motivation for writing the novel was deliberately to put, as I've said before, a Jamaican woman in Jane Austen's territory. For me, the most important thing was that British history has for a long time gotten away with erasing the reality of the contribution of enslaved people to the development of the country. I think the key to doing that is because, unlike America, slavery did not take place on British soil. It took place in the colonies, in the West Indies. People were tucked out of sight, and so no one ever really had to confront the reality of, where did all of these carriages and mansions and grand country estates come from, and on the backs of whose suffering? That was really important to me because I'm a Caribbean woman, it was on the backs of my ancestors. [The story] was about bringing that history home. There are so many stories, real stories, in British history about West Indian immigrants [moving] to London in the 18th and 19th centuries and the rich, full, interesting lives they lived. It seemed like a real shame to me thinking about writing a book in the 21st century that no one had thought to dramatize [those stories] on the page or on-screen at that point [in time] before. I really wanted to bring those two things together and get people to face up to that history.
Speaking of Frannie's desires, what was the most challenging part of balancing Frannie's desires with past, more problematic relationships that have been portrayed in the media between the employee and employer, or enslaved and slaver?
I was not trying to minimize that [aspect with the] love story. I described [the story] as a gothic romance and as a love story. One of the questions it throws up is, ‘could this really have been love?’ I hope viewers will connect with these two women and feel for them. They are drawn to each other, and they care for each other. [However] in the circumstances of their time and the relationship they have to each other as mistress and maid, it is important to ask whether a kind of real love was possible and whether that love was healthy for either of them, and the extent to which they could transcend their circumstances. [This is] still probably a relevant question now in a relationship with an unequal power dynamic, but certainly a question that would smack you in the face back then, when the foundation of this whole society was this unequal power dynamic. It's also important to note that they each experience — in that society they're on the receiving end of that dynamic. Both the mistress is trapped in her situation as the spoiled, indulged wife of a society man who doesn't allow her to do anything, and Frannie is trapped, and they each have their own selfish perspective on what that means for them.
As a follow-up to the previous question, what do you want queer viewers to take away from this story since so much of the story is about Frannie's and Marguerite’s relationship?
I mean, for me it's the same as I would hope that Black viewers would take away from the story, which is, for me it's about seeing something on the screen that is centering the experience of someone who has traditionally not been centered in this kind of genre. So I personally find it pretty refreshing to think that we have put a queer Black woman in a space where history and literature would not have thought to put her before. I think that's really powerful. But also, for me anyway, first and foremost I wanted to operate on a story level. I don't want people to think this is just an exercise or that there is some point here other than trying to honestly tell the story of a woman who happens to be queer, who happens to have been enslaved, but who has and should inspire [in] all of us a kind of reflection on those universal desires. The things that we all want and that so many of us have been deprived of throughout the history of storytelling for various reasons, including homophobia, racism, and the experience of slavery.
What advice do you have for future Black creatives who want to pursue making a period drama?
Do it, do it! Things have changed so much even since when I wrote this novel — the Bridgerton [television series] wasn't a thing. I knew about the “Bridgerton” books. I had read them, in fact, but those novels are conceived as white, and so Bridgerton [on Netflix] wasn't a thing, it was released after I wrote the novel. The landscape is changing. I think there could not be a more exciting time to be doing this, in particular on the period front. And also it's really exciting, I can speak from personal experience having crossed the mountain, looking back on it. To see a character like Frannie center stage in a period romance period piece is just so exhilarating and gratifying. So my advice is, do it. We need more of these stories, and I think producers and creatives are recognizing the value in these stories as well.
All episodes of The Confessions Of Frannie Langton will premiere on BritBox US on March 8th. Then, Sanditon returns for season 3 on March 19, and Tom Jones premieres April 30. Previous seasons of Sanditon are here, and The Long Song is available here.
