Renegade Review: FX's Taboo

Welcome Renegade Nation it’s me Naughty Nicole and it’s time for another Renegade Review. Today we’re taking a look at Taboo, FX's bleak new period miniseries. Now I’m the first one to say I love me some Tom Hardy. Seriously, the guy could read the phone book and make it fucking intense. And I love me some British drama’s – dry old Downton Abbey, sign me up. So when I heard that FX was taking two of my favorite things and making a showcase for star Tom Hardy's unapologetic weirdness, I jumped with glee. The eccentric 39-year-old English actor plays James Delaney, a mysterious figure who returns to London in 1814 following the death of his father and spends most of the first episode brooding and intimidating people. Like a gloomy reality-show contestant, Delaney is not here to make friends.

It doesn’t take long to realize that “Taboo,” the heavy-breathing new FX series set in Regency England, is going to be very ripe viewing. Rain on the moors, tubs of offal, bodies with coppers on the eyes, grave robbers, a funeral procession led by a dwarf — we’re talking the whole dark-gothic playbook. And that’s before we get to the half-sibling incest and the slave ship flashbacks and the Native American incantations.

But the most self-consciously gloomy thing about “Taboo,” which begins its eight-episode run on Tuesday, is its star, Tom Hardy, who created the show with his father, Chips Hardy, and the writer and producer Steven Knight. As James Keziah Delaney, who returns to London from abroad to reclaim his family legacy, Mr. Hardy growls, rasps, glowers and, when Delaney is caught without an answer, makes a popping noise that resembles a grunt.