Claire Danes has come in from the cold. Two years after we left her snooping around Moscow in "Homeland," she has reemerged in Victorian England, pottering about the coast in "The Essex Serpent" on Apple TV Plus. Things are still pretty chilly for her, though.
Danes plays wealthy widow Cora Seaborne in this six-episode miniseries, an adaptation of the award-winning novel by Sarah Perry. Cora has a lot in common with Carrie Mathison in "Homeland": She's headstrong, charming, a little narcissistic, coping with trauma and always the smartest person in the parlor.
The show begins with the disappearance of a girl in the gloomy marshes of Essex, which is blamed on a mysterious sea creature, and the death of Cora's husband in their London mansion after a long illness. There are hints that Cora suffered abuse at his hands, and his death liberates her; she can do what she wants, and she follows her passion for natural history to the fishing village where the creature was supposedly seen. Freed from one monster, she sets off in search of another.
There's a lot going on inside "The Essex Serpent," not all of it successful, though the miniseries is generally handsome, literate and quite well acted. The most pedestrian aspect is the social-change drama, in which Cora and her politically minded lady's maid and best friend, Martha (Hayley Squires), try to empower women and help the poor.
More successful still is the Victorian drama of ideas, in which Cora and a brilliant, buoyantly conceited young surgeon, Luke (an excellent Frank Dillane), stand in for Darwin and Freud, and God is represented by Will (Tom Hiddleston), a learned and rational local vicar who insists that the serpent is a product of the villagers' imaginations but begins to have doubts.
And then there's the associated love story, which is what you'll take away from "The Essex Serpent," not necessarily because it's so sexy or interesting but because the actors involved are so hard to take your eyes off. The single Luke and the married Will (whose wife, played by Clémence Poésy) are both besotted with Cora, while she, still scarred by her marriage, struggles to find a way to respond.
As always with Danes, there is no question why the men in the story are so drawn to her character — Cora's intelligence and vibrancy and depth of emotion leap out at you, present in every movement and change of expression.
Dillane is Danes' match as the callow but sensitive Luke, hitting the right mix of irritating and endearing. Hiddleston, taking a break from his duties in the Marvel universe, is perfectly fine but a little stiff and bland; that's probably because Will has been contrived as a stick figure who mediates between Cora and the suspicious, resentful villagers.
"The Essex Serpent" never quite takes off in the way it should, though. Like a lot of contemporary prestige-TV productions, it seems to have worked so hard and so carefully to achieve the right surface patina that it forgot about being exciting.
There are surprises in the plot, but you rarely feel the shock of real surprise, or of vision, in the filmmaking. It's a tasteful and static enterprise that deserves attention because it comes to life whenever Danes is onscreen.
