Critic Reviews

The story of Outrageous is deathly serious, but the vibe is still somehow effervescently fun. This balance makes it intoxicating. .... Outrageous is the platonic ideal of what the period drama can be.

Whether you know about the Mitford sisters or not, Outrageous is still worth watching, as it delivers a polarizing, relevant, and lush '30s period drama, both dazzling us and stripping off our rose-tinted glasses.

Maybe the most impressive thing about Outrageous is that it never judges the often repellent actions of its stranger-than-fiction subjects—only Nancy does, with the pithiness of a well-to-do lady novelist and the blind eye of a loving sister. Watching the Mitfords make terrible choice after terrible choice is like seeing a train wreck in slow motion while sipping on a flute of champagne.

It’s the parallel close bonds between Nancy and Diana, and Unity and Jessica, that provide much of the dramatic meat of the series. .... The Mitford family, for all their wealth and distance from the present day, may bear more familiarity than we’d like.

While the script editors could have taken more care with some of the clunky exposition, this is undeniably fun and jaunty; and while it has moments that feel like daft posho pastiche, the realisation quickly dawns that these people really were like that, at least on the surface.

The real charm of the series is its ability to balance the dark and the light, honing in on the fact that, above all else, the Mitfords were a real family.

The acting is the draw in “Outrageous,” which never really convinces anyone of anything except how popular fascism was in ’30s Britain, and how that might be worth noting now.