Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Joan’ On BritBox, About A Woman Who Becomes A Jewel Thief While Struggling To Keep Custody Of Her Daughter

Bipgraphical series can be tricky, because they can shift too much into a mode where there’s little to no conflict — Netflix’s Senna is a good example of that. But it’s easier when a person’s life has nothing but conflict. The life of Joan Hannington, one of the UK’s most notorious jewel thieves in the 1980s, has more twists and turns than most, as we see in this new miniseries about how she fell into a life of very elegant crime.

JOAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As “Brass In Pocket” plays, we push in on a woman doing her makeup. She’s wearing a skull cap so she can put a wig on. There are many scars on her back. “London, 1985.”

The Gist: After this elegantly-dressed woman gets in the back of a Rolls-Royce, we flash back four months, to the Kent Coast. Joan O’Connell (Sophie Turner) is with her daughter Kelly (Mia Millichamp-Long). Her boyfriend — and Kelly’s father — Gary (Nick Blood) pulls up in an expensive sports car to bring Joan to her bartender job. He also gives her a fur coat for her birthday. When she asks where she got these things, he gets pissed and drives off.

At the bar, she gets hit on by a window salesman named Tom (Jack Greenlees), who has seemed to be at the bar a lot lately. After Joan comes home to see Gary packing to leave quickly, she finds out Tom is a cop who’s been watching Gary and his associates.

In the middle of the night, two gang thugs break in and hold Joan at gunpoint, demanding they tell her where Gary is; he owes them money. After they leave, she knows what she has to do. She brings Kelly to social services, asking them to put her in foster care until she can find a new job and place to live. Then she goes to London and asks her sister Val (Laura Aikman) for a job at her salon.

Joan gets a makeover and now looks the part of a sophisticated London stylist, but can’t handle annoying customers. Also, when she gets word she can visit Kelly in her foster home, she blows off work, nicks a car and drives up. She’s heartened to see her daughter doing well, but is arrested for stealing the car. She sees Tom in lockup and asks him not to tell social services.

Val tells Joan to look for another job; somehow, Joan fakes her way into a job at a jewelry store. But when the owner, Bernard (Alex Blake), starts getting a little too forward during an inventory night, Joan finds some loose diamonds, swallows them, and leaves. She’s oddly thrilled by what she did, and when she meets an antique dealer named Boisie Hannington (Frank Dillane), in a pub, she tells him she’s a thief.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Joan, created by Anna Symon and based on the real-life story of Joan Hannington, made us think of Lupin, another show about a thief who has struggles in their non-thieving lives.

Our Take: Symon, her co-writer Helen Black and director Richard Laxton certainly try their best to give Joan an 1980s feel, with constant needle drops of ’80s hits. Even Joan’s look veers between her more casual, acid-washed jeans outfits and color-blocked dresses and jackets with massive shoulder pads. The bob her sister gives her makes her look like she might come straight out of a Duran Duran video.

That look certainly helps get viewers in Joan’s headspace, and Turner’s performance gets us the rest of the way. We see that she’s desperate to get away from scumbags like Gary and take control of her life, taking the extreme measure of voluntarily putting her daughter in the foster system to do it. But we can also tell that she’s a shapeshifter, easily able to inhabit a more sophisticated personality and manner to get what she needs to get done. Turner is able to shift -between working-class mom-in-trouble and elegant ’80s career woman/jewel thief with so much ease, you can’t even tell that she’s made a shift at certain points in the first episode.

When Joan wakes up in Boisie’s flat and starts looking around, she realizes he deals in more than just antiques, which plays into her plan to fence the diamonds she swallowed and maybe even do more than that. As she does jobs for Boisie, and they likely fall for each other, the pull of her daughter still being in foster care will be on Joan’s mind. It’s likely the part of the story that will ground Joan as her career as a high-rolling jewel thief accelerates.

While Turner and Dillane have good chemistry as Joan and Boisie, it’s Turner’s performance during Joan’s metamorphosis that will keep us watching.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Joan tells Boisie, “If you rip me off, I’ll fucking kill you.” Boisie responds by saying, “Snap.”

Sleeper Star: Nick Blood is so slimy as Gary, that we were rooting for Joan to stab him during a scene where he confronts her at the salon.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Bernard reached across Joan to point out line items in the inventory ledger, we got the shivers. It’s such an obvious move on her skeevy boss’ part, but that was the ’80s, wasn’t it?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Joan is an example of a show that rides on the lead performance, where Sophie Turner effectively shows Joan Hannington’s transformation from struggling working-class mother to one of Britain’s most notorious jewel thieves.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.