Wolf Hall

🕯️ Candles, Silence, and a Radical Visual Choice

Kosminsky made a decision on series one that set the whole look of Wolf Hall apart from every other period drama on television. He filmed scenes by actual candlelight. Not with modern lighting rigs disguised as candles. Real candles, long exposures, no boosted gain.

The effect is extraordinary. Faces emerge out of darkness. A conversation in Austin Friars becomes a painting by Georges de La Tour. There is a sense of being in the room at the edge of what a sixteenth-century person could actually see. Modern television tends to light Tudor interiors like a hotel lobby. Wolf Hall is having none of it.

It is the first period drama I can think of that looks like the period actually looked.

Pair that with Debbie Wiseman's restrained score, and long takes in which two men sit across a table and one of them loses everything without raising his voice, and you get a visual register that feels closer to European arthouse than Sunday-night heritage TV. Some viewers bounce off it for that reason. They want more. The show knows exactly what it is refusing, and I admire it for the refusal.

🧠 What It Is Really About

On the surface Wolf Hall is the story of Henry VIII's break with Rome, the fall of Anne Boleyn, and the machinery Cromwell built to make it happen. The surface is good. The substance underneath is better.

The trilogy is about class. Cromwell is a Putney blacksmith's son in a court of hereditary nobles, and the nobles never let him forget it. The Duke of Norfolk would happily see him dead on the basis of birth alone. Mantel's argument, delivered patiently over three volumes, is that the violence of Tudor politics was in part the violence of old blood trying to reject new blood from the body of the state. The show puts it in almost every scene. Watch who sits and who stands. Watch whose knee bends and whose does not.

It is also about memory. Wolsey's ghost, and all the dead that a sixteenth-century man carried with him unremarked. The 2024 series, shot after Mantel had died, leans into this hard. There is a reason the final volume is called The Mirror and the Light.

And it is about the cost of service to a man who can kill you for any reason, or none at all. Henry and Cromwell are close throughout. That closeness is not protection. It is the opposite.

📈 Reception and Legacy

The 2015 series won the BAFTA for Best Drama. Rylance won Best Actor. It was nominated for eight Emmys and won a Golden Globe. Critics in the UK treated it as the benchmark against which future BBC drama would be judged, and for most of the decade since they were right to.

The nine-year wait between S1 and S2 came down to Mantel. The Mirror and the Light did not arrive as a novel until 2020. By the time the adaptation began shooting, Mantel had died. The 2024 series is therefore a posthumous completion of a trilogy she never got to see finished on screen. That fact gives the second series a specific weight. Kosminsky, Straughan, Rylance and Lewis were finishing someone else's great work in her absence, and they knew it.

If you want to see what prestige British television can do when it is not chasing a streaming algorithm, this is it. Compare its patience to the forward momentum of Peaky Blinders. It has the ensemble scale of Rome but none of the battlefield scope. The medieval sword-and-mud of The Last Kingdom and Vikings looks like another genre entirely next to it. Slow Horses is the closest modern peer for sheer quality of dialogue, even if the setting could not be further away.

🏆 Why It Works

It works because three world-class artists agreed to trust the audience. Kosminsky trusts you to sit with a candle-lit silence. Straughan gives you conversations where nobody says the thing they mean, and expects you to keep up. Rylance will sometimes go a full minute without speaking, and the camera does not cut away. Almost no modern show asks this of a viewer. Almost no modern show earns it.

The anti-More reading is the best example. Robert Bolt canonised Thomas More in 1960 as a saint of conscience. Mantel looked at the historical record, saw a man who authorised executions for translating the Bible into English, and wrote a More who is cold, brilliant, and genuinely terrifying. Anton Lesser plays him that way without apology. This is a political intervention in how the English remember the Reformation, and it lands because the show commits.

Seven episodes of series one. Six of series two. No filler. If you can meet the show on its own terms, it rewards you more than any British drama in years.

Jack Lowden

Thomas Wyatt