Over the weekend, I rewatched 2002’s The Forsyte Saga, one of those British period piece shows like Downton Abbey that you either love or that bore you to tears. Usually they bore me to tears, but I was hugely moved by this one when I first saw it in 2012, and I was moved by it again in 2024.
There have been a couple screen adaptations of The Forsyte Saga, which was originally an early 20th-century series of books by Nobel Prize winner John Galsworthy. The one I’ve watched was a 2002/2003 miniseries by England’s ITV and PBS, starring, among others, Homeland's Damian Lewis and Rupert Graves, whom I’ll say is from Sherlock because everything I personally recognize him from makes me feel really old. The story follows the wealthy Forsyte family from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, and in particular Soames Forsyte, played by Lewis.
Lest you imagine the whole show is British people demurely walking into rooms going “oh” like that “Dressed to Kill” sketch, here is a very early 2000s trailer to disabuse you of that notion:
The family drama of it all comes from how individuals’ choices reflect on the Forsyte family’s standing and future. In the first episode, Graves’ character Jolyon leaves his wife for their governess, which causes him to be disowned by his father. There’s nothing “wrong” with Jolyon’s marriage, which is true for several of the marriages in the series; it’s just that he’s in love with someone else and wants to be with her instead, which was very not done for a family like the Forsytes at that time. This schism splits the family for a long time, and also introduces one of the central themes of the series, that of following your heart even when it hurts others. Other characters in the series mostly explore this by falling in love with each other in increasingly disastrous ways, sneaking off with each others’ spouses or partners or friends or family members. (I had to pause the second season for a minute and sketch out exactly how its two lovers were related, because I kept muttering “wait, aren’t they cousins?” in alarm.)
Soames begins the series as a cold figure, interested in doing the right things: being, as the books have him, a “man of property,” having a stable job as a solicitor, finding a wife, having a son. He decides that wife will be Irene Heron, who marries him for the stability and under the agreement that if the marriage doesn’t work out, she will be free to leave him.
Soames is meant to be sort of fundamentally unlovable, but during my latest rewatch, I don’t necessarily think he starts out that way. Instead, he becomes that way from his reaction to the very upfront fact that Irene doesn’t love him. This gnaws at him; it makes him cruel and possessive and demanding. He’s not exactly a powerful figure, more a standard issue upper class Brit, and while there is so much in the world that he can bend to his will with his money and standing, he can’t do the same for human emotions. This ultimately comes to make him a terrible person, and most of the series is driven by the appalling lengths he goes to to try to create the life he thinks he deserves. In particular–and to give you warning–there’s an instance of sexual assault in the show whose ramifications reverberate; this is made complex by the laws and expectations regarding marriage at that time. I remember being horrified by it the first time I watched the show, and this time, I caught more of the way everyone grapples with this event and how that changes as the years pass.
When I first watched the show in 2012, I was a few years removed from a really bad time in my life where I lost a home I loved, the partner I’d lived there with, and–this part is too complicated to explain in full–my trust in the activist community I’d built up around those spaces. I retreated from that wider community, and I was really solitary and bitter and disillusioned for many years. What I saw in The Forsyte Saga then was, unexpectedly, myself: many of the things that had happened to me were really shitty and I was justifiably hurt by them, but watching Soames’ behavior helped me see how part of my anger at my old partner and friends was because they were living a life I thought of as mine, that some of the ways I was feeling were, at their core, a kind of possessiveness I didn’t know I had in me. Though I dealt with my feelings in much less horrible ways than Soames–mostly by drinking alone or, I’ll admit, being a bit of a petty jerk to some people who in no way deserved it simply because they were happy when I wasn’t–the show felt like a warning about how my bitterness could consume me if I didn't figure out how to let the past go.
In 2024, I’ve mostly put all that stuff behind me, but watching The Forsyte Saga this time, especially with the self-awareness of sobriety, made me realize that those tendencies still live inside me. I think they live in a lot of us, even when we think they don’t; it can feel good to pump our hurts up into grand injustices that can consume us, to tell ourselves stories that cover over the simple truth that sometimes we just can’t have the things we want. I don’t think Soames is meant to be an instructive or relatable character, but the show does a pretty good job of holding him in the wrong without painting him as a one-note bad guy. On this rewatch I was more aware of how complicated many of the show’s characters are, and how the series explores how we view the behavior of people we love, how families or groups or communities deal with each other’s actions when they’re bound together. I was surprised by how many of the series’ themes feel relevant today, even for a period show about rich people wearing pretty dresses and demanding things of servants.
The Forsyte Saga is a little hard to find these days; I found a YouTube rip, though you can also pay for it on Amazon or Apple TV. There’s also apparently going to be a new version on PBS, which just started filming.
