Glamorizing fascists is really gross

The Mitford sisters have been called the Kardashians of their time, and it’s an apt comparison: Though three of them would go on to become authors, all were famous long before they’d done much of anything. They were daughters of a baron, cousins of the Churchills, and came of age in the UK between the wars, coddled in carefree privilege. An endless source of fascination for the society press, the Mitfords possessed cutting wit, a passel of nicknames for one another, and the kind of eccentricities that are considered delightful so long as they come with a deep pedigree.

Eldest sister Nancy, who became a writer of scathingly comic novels that mined her family for inspiration, had a circle of close friends heralded in postwar London as the Bright Young Things; one of them, Evelyn Waugh, immortalized Diana in his 1930 novel “Vile Bodies.” John Betjeman, the future UK poet laureate, spent years wooing Pamela, the most reserved sister. Youngest sibling Deborah, who eventually became the Duchess of Devonshire, sat for the painter Lucien Freud, among other celebrated portraitists. Jessica, the second-youngest and the family’s “red sheep,” moved to America, joined the Communist Party and became a muckraking author of books like “The American Way of Death” (1963), a bestselling exposé of the funeral industry; and “Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business.” As for the other two sisters, Diana and Unity — well, whatever else you can say about the Kardashians, they know that optics can make or break a family, and seemed to have little trouble clearing a very low bar: no longer tolerating a fascist in the house.

As breathlessly as the sisters were chronicled in their lifetimes, their cultural afterlife has been particularly tenacious. Nancy’s novels have been adapted into BBC programs, while “Downton Abbey”’s pitiless Lady Violet is rumored to have been based on the author herself. Diana appears as a character in “Peaky Blinders.” In 2017, Gucci debuted a navy sweater reading “Never Marry a Mitford,” a direct reference to the husband of youngest sister Deborah — Andrew Cavendish, the Duke of Devonshire, apparently had a taste for custom-knit slogan sweaters.

There are enough books about the sisters to fill a small library, among them Mary S. Lovell’s “The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family” (2003), Laura Thompson’s “The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters,’ (2017) and Jonathan Guinness’s “The House of Mitford” (2015). There are also biographies of various sisters, collections of correspondence like “The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters” (2008) and “Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford”(2006). Jessica Fellowes’ six-book Mitford Murders series features the three oldest sisters as protagonists. There’s a historical novel, “The Mitford Affair” (2023), a book of winsome advice on modern life called The Mitford Girls’ Guide to Life (2013), and even a graphic novel, “Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me,” set to be published this fall.

And most recently, there is “Outrageous,” a six-episode BritBox series adapted from Lovell’s “The Sisters” set in the prewar 1930s and filled with all the sumptuous gowns, sisterly sniping and horsey-gardeny English countryside you would expect (The Mitfords were to Tatler what the Kardashians are to Us Weekly.) The show’s cast includes BBC all-stars James Purefoy and Anna Chancellor as parents Lord and Lady Redesdale, who live in genteel poverty at their sprawling country estate and spend most of their screen time worrying about their headstrong children, or at least a few of them. Narrated by Nancy (Bessie Carter), the narrative arc of “Outrageous” is most prominently focused on Diana and Unity, the two Mitford sisters who become avowed fascists in the years before World War II. 

Diana (Joanna Vanderham), the uncontested beauty of the family, leaves her marriage to brewing heir Bryan Guinness for Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse), head of the British Union of Fascists, and quickly becomes part of the innermost of Nazi inner circles. (Her 1936 wedding to Mosley was held at the home of Joseph Goebbels.) Back home, the bedroom walls of teenage Unity (Shannon Watson), the family’s oddest duck, are papered with photos of a sieg-heiling Adolf Hitler, and she successfully petitions her parents to let her move to Munich, ostensibly for school but mostly to stalk the man she adoringly calls “The Fuhrer.” (Unity’s obsession might have been predestined: She was conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika and given the middle name Valkyrie as a nod to Richard Wagner, later known as Hitler’s favorite composer.) 

Once in Munich, Unity stakes out his favorite restaurant, appearing day after day until he notices her and even, on occasion, allows her to sit at his table; breathlessly recounting one lunch, she tells Diana “He put his hand on my shoulder twice! And once on my arm!” The diaries kept by Unity between 1935 and 1939, which were discovered earlier this year, are crammed with similar minutiae of the 139 times she interacted with Hitler; one review likened them to “the besotted outpourings of a teenage Taylor Swift fan.”

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The show’s other plotlines detail Nancy’s doomed romances with, respectively, a closeted gay man and a drunken philanderer; Jessica’s (Zoe Brough) growing communist sympathies and desire to experience a world beyond her family’s (she eventually eloped with a fellow communist Churchill cousin, Esmond Romily); and the dismal state of the Baron’s finances, which eventually require renting their estate to a man who, Lord Redesdale marvels in one of the series’ funniest scenes, has an actual job. Viewers are meant to empathize with the less fascism-curious Mitfords, who are mortified when the UK press gets wind of their sisters’ Nazi hobnobbing. But the presentation of Diana and Unity’s politics as a terribly embarrassing quirk of an eccentric but otherwise respectable family imbues too much of “Outrageous” with a kind of daffy, unsettling giddiness backgrounded by tootling jazz interludes. Oh, those crazy Mitford girls — what will they do next?

This isn’t to suggest that “Outrageous” co-signs its characters’ totalitarian fangirling. Had the show debuted in, say, the 1990s or 2000s, when most of the world still seemed to agree that Nazis were firmly on the wrong side of history and should stay there, the show’s lightness would translate the way I’m assuming its writer, Sarah Williams, and its parent company, the BBC, means it to. After all, it’s a British show with a British cast on a streaming service called BritBox — why would anyone involved worry about drawing inadvertent parallels to America as it descends into active authoritarianism? Fair question. But “Outrageous” is not a good look right now. 

(Hulton-Deutsch/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images) Unity Mitford, admirer of Adolph Hitler, leaves a hotel on a stretcher in Folkestone for her home in High Wycombe after a visit to Germany.

Because right now, the United States, a country that built its myths of rugged individualism on rejecting the British monarchy, has a leader who acts like a king. Right now, masked men who may or may not be ICE agents are snatching people who they believe “look like immigrants” off the streets and whisking them away in unmarked vans. Right now, the richest man in the world has made some adjustments to his global social network’s AI bot because users complained that it was being too woke. Right now, that bot is calling itself “MechaHitler.” So I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that this is not the moment to try and make Manic Pixie Dream Fascists happen. Nor is it the moment to have the official copy for the show coyly lauding the Mitfords as “unapologetically bold” mavericks who “defied convention” — it might be technically true, but the phrasing is willfully disingenuous given the show’s focus. It’s surely not the moment to portray the leader of the British Union of Fascists as an absolute snack. Unity’s obsession with Hitler highlights that his power was alluring enough; Oswald Mosley, by contrast, is blessed with the physique of a Greek statue and the bearing of Errol Flynn.

The soft-pedaling of Mosley is more than just his appearance; since most of his scenes are one-on-ones with Diana, his odious rhetoric is barely heard, only referenced. Oswald’s great-grandson, as it happens, is the executive producer of “Outrageous.” And though Matthew Mosley’s involvement with the project is touted as pure coincidence, an interview with Time also suggests that the younger Mosley is accustomed to others glossing over his great grandad’s biography for the sake of his comfort: “At school, when we were studying the Second World War, my teacher politely moved over that section.” It’s not a stretch to consider how much he benefited from a similar restraint in the show’s creators. 

“Outrageous” can be enjoyable, and it’s certainly a solid primer for Mitford newcomers. But was it necessary to air it now? There is no dearth of lore from what Jessica sourly called “the Mitford industry” and probably never will be: Like their counterparts in Calabasas, the sisters are a brand. Critic Andrew O’Hagan, in writing about “The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters,” pointed out that  the devil-may-care Mitford attitude that powers their immortality was the result of “a general respect, born of early life in the Redesdale household, for the utterly unreasonable, and each of the girls gains comfort from the idea that one can live a jolly life so long as one knows it’s all absurd.” 

“Outrageous” might have showcased the real-world implications of such an idea more successfully in a time that was jollier than the present. As it is, no amount of aristocratic frippery and snappy dialogue can keep it from crossing the line between thoughtful and tasteless.