Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | TV | March 16, 2026
The British channel ITV either had the best possible timing with the release of their latest true-life drama miniseries, The Lady, or the absolute worst, depending on your perspective. In the week that they had scheduled the UK premiere of a show featuring the royal family, specifically the fallen House of York, the one-time Prince Andrew was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. It was the culmination of a years-long downfall for Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, with continued revelations regarding his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein showing just how crooked he was. He wasn’t alone in his corruption. His one-time wife, Sarah Ferguson, was especially cozy with the convicted sex criminal, borrowing money from him and bringing her kids to meet him after he got out of jail. I’m unsure if this barrage of news made the British public hungrier for more royal content or hesitant to check out a show where Ferguson is a main character. Royal programming is a crucial foundation of our cultural output, and this story has a murder in it, which always sells well. But without the vague involvement of Fergie and company, The Lady is a rather paltry watch, and an aggravating one at that.
Jane Andrews (Mia McKenna-Bruce) had grand aspirations. Born into a working-class family that struggled with debts, she dealt with various traumas during her adolescence and hoped to move up the social ladder in adulthood. After answering an anonymous ad for a personal dresser, she found herself being interviewed in Buckingham Palace for a job with Sarah, the Duchess of York (Natalie Dormer.) Now with money in her pocket and an invitation to mingle with London’s elite, Jane feels like she’s made it. But mental illness and jealousy threaten to throw things awry.
The show opens with a disclaimer warning the viewer that The Lady is ‘inspired by a true story’ and that ‘some characters, events and scenes have been created and merged for dramatic purposes.’ That’s pretty standard for a biopic or historical drama, especially one where most of the featured players are still alive. Here, though, it feels like the show is making excuses for itself. It has to jazz things up to conceal the fact that, really, there’s just not much going on here. But even the obvious soapy redos can’t hold this flimsy narrative together.
This isn’t about a royal murder or crime involving a royal. Jane Andrews was a peripheral player in the monarchy at best, and her killing of a lover who reportedly refused to marry her (played by Ed Speleers from Downton Abbey) is not without intrigue but its nuances are insensitively handled in favour of a forced blend of The Crown and a creaky British procedural from decades prior. It’s a shame because, under different circumstances, a savvier writer could have found some striking threads to weave on themes of class and mental illness.
Mia McKenna-Bruce, so baby-faced and fragile, plays Jane as a woman who has been wronged by the world and must fight to crawl out of the gutter. Jane softens her working-class accent to fit in better with the snobs of London and finds a combination of kinship and stan obsession with Sarah. But ambition and the realities of the British class system clash, and her eagerness to cling onto what she’s fought so hard to maintain seems doomed from the beginning. It’s a shame that the show doesn’t delve more into Jane’s life in this manner. It seems content to do a Cinderella story rise, with a few shopping montages, before going to the fall right on schedule. We have a working-class woman in the hallowed echelons of the true upper classes, one who’s worked to get there, but it’s never enough for the power players. If only the show went further into this instead of going for a diluted Single White Female angle as Jane tries to emulate Sarah.
Months before the premiere, following the first wave of Epstein files that revealed the extent of Ferguson’s dealings with Epstein, Natalie Dormer announced that she would not promote the show and would donate her fee from it to charity. One cannot blame her for wanting to distance herself from a junket cycle where everyone would ask her questions about playing a scamming BFF of a paedophile. But she’s also pretty good here. It is a problem that she doesn’t look much like Sarah given how much of the press at this time focused on her being ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’, and Dormer is so svelte and graceful that it almost feels cruel to cast her. Still, she does convey the haughtiness of a woman who was both highly ambitious and not especially smart. Andrew, mercifully, is not a character here.
The hunger for true crime content has elevated a lot of sad but ultimately everyday stories to the status of must-see-TV grotesqueries over the past few years. There’s a hunger to find grand thematic connections with every case, or something stylistically intriguing for audiences groomed to consume days’ of slickly shot murder sprees. Jane Andrews, who is still alive and out of prison, is a mentally ill woman who killed a man and also once worked for a duchess. It’s not hard to see what drew ITV to that story, but in lieu of exploring anything unique or potentially uncomfortable, they wanted a hot new binge-watch with a tabloid sheen. I’m sure Peter Morgan is desperate to make a spinoff of The Crown that focuses on the York stuff he kept out of the original show, so maybe just wait until he makes that for a more effective dramatization.
The Lady premieres in the USA on Britbox on March 18.
