Tom Jones: A Novel Idea

If you were to pick the ideal eighteenth-century novel for a twenty-first-century reboot, Tom Jones would not be it. Henry Fielding's 1749 bildungsroman is long and meandering with a lead character who, on the face of it, is a gadabout.

Or as Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso) puts it: "When I was younger, at the age of seventeen, I actually stopped reading the book because it annoyed me so much: he's dirty, randy and self-serving."

In modern-day television, dirty, randy and self-serving male leads are not high on most programmers' wish lists. So what did writer Gwyneth Hughes (who adapted William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair for Prime Video in 2018) see in Tom Jones?

"When Damien Timmer at Mammoth Screen [the UK production company] suggested Tom Jones, I hadn't read it. When I did, it wasn't at all what I was expecting — randy shagger lays his way across London was what I thought it would be. But it's not. It's just so funny and charming, like bathing in sunshine. I read it some months before everything went bad with the pandemic and since then it's just come into its own as a project: what could be better at the moment than a lovely romantic comedy?"

Masterpiece's Tom Jones, which debuts April 30 on PBS, tells the story of an out-of-wedlock infant who is dumped on the doorstep of the wealthy Squire Allworthy (James Fleet, Bridgerton) and adopted. As a young man, Tom (Solly McLeod) falls in love with his beautiful and virtuous neighbor, Sophia Western (Sophie Wilde, You Don't Know Me). The novel tells the story of their eventual romance, but in between, Tom travels the country and sows, to borrow a phrase, his wild oats.

Yet contrary to Waddingham's recollection, Hughes found the novel to be a relatively tasteful affair. "It's a thousand pages long and poor old Tom has three sexual partners. In the grand scheme of things that isn't that bad."

What Hughes noticed instead was the depth of the female characters, namely Aunt Western (Shirley Henderson, Happy Valley), her maid Honour (Pearl Mackie, Doctor Who) and Lady Bellaston, Tom's high-society, hedonistic, somewhat older London lover, played by Waddingham.

"The female characters — completely to my surprise — are just so loud and confident and full of beans," Hughes says. "It's absolutely clear to Fielding in the eighteenth century that they're just as up for it as the men. In fact, more so."

Indeed, in Hughes's reading, the energy driving the story of Tom Jones is not the character Tom Jones at all, but Sophia. "Tom sort of wanders about a bit being useless and having crises. Whereas she leaves home, leaves behind everything she's ever known and goes to find him. She goes after this — at this point in the story — slightly rubbish boyfriend. She's just this charming, fantastic heroine — really positive and go-getting."

It was this Tom Jones that was offered to director Georgia Parris as a potential four-part limited series. Parris was then one of the hottest young female directors in Britain, whose short films, Abandon and A Moment to Move, had placed her firmly at the top of TV's most-wanted list.

"It was quite a coup to get Georgia onto a project like this," says producer Benjamin Greenacre. "Her debut feature, Mari, was hugely admired in the industry and we knew she would bring something different."

"I'd always wanted to do a costume drama, it's been on the bucket list," Parris says. "But I didn't want to do a costume drama just for the sake of it because they obviously are very dated in lots of ways. This immediately felt relevant and exciting to me because of what Gwyn had done with the adaptation."

It was Parris's first television job, as well as the first script she'd be directing that she hadn't written herself. Thanks to a baby and the pandemic, she'd had nearly three years off. Her previous work was all about low budgets, short shoots and arthouse sensibilities. A huge production with a nearly five-hour runtime, set in stately homes with crunchy gravel and posh frocks, was well out of her comfort zone.

"This was a whole different ballgame," she says. "But it felt liberating to be doing something that felt light and relevant."

Relevant, she says, because Tom Jones as a guy who merrily romps his way around Britain just won't wash in 2023. "A promiscuous young male in today's world has to be held accountable," she says. "I'm particularly interested in female stories, and I feel very strongly about that. The challenge for me was: how am I going to make that feel justified? And that's what I think people will find interesting — because just Tom and his wit don't cut it anymore."

Almost every period drama of the last decade has arrived promising it will be different from period dramas that have gone before. The challenge for a new adaptation is how to be different from all the other different ones. Tom Jones was made into a film in 1963 and 1976 and a miniseries in 1997.

Greenacre describes this Tom Jones using negatives: "It's not Regency — it's a little bit earlier than that. It's not Jane Austen — it's fifty years earlier than that. It's not Downton, which is 100 years later than that, so it's this nice period that isn't seen so much and isn't in people's heads as 'period.'"

But what is it? Like Hughes and Parris, Greenacre says he hopes this Tom Jones will surprise. "I hope that there's a twist. It's not a twist of 'Look how much money we have,' ... or 'Look how many bold, brash colors we have,' which I feel has already been done. We've got something different because we've got modern casting, and the backstories and the book have been changed to reflect society as it is now."

By modern casting he means both leads, Wilde and McLeod. Wilde, the Australian actress who plays heroine Sophia Western, is mixed race, a radical shift in the storytelling that Greenacre says was given full historical authentication.

"We consulted a historian and found out how someone might end up being a mixed-race person in the mid-eighteenth century, who was connected to a wealthy family [the Westerns]. And that's what became part of the script."

"I think a character's sex and age and ethnic background are really important. They're not just painted on," Hughes says. "I wanted her to be a real mixed-race British girl. We did a lot of research. I had a fantastic professor to help us who's in [England] but she's Jamaican American. Her life's work is to illuminate the history of Jamaica and the West Indies. We had enormous fun working out how to bring a Black heiress into this world. It actually worked historically — it's possible that this could have happened."

"The script is true to the period, and it discusses race issues of the period," Wilde says, pointing out that in the book the narrator avoids concrete details of Sophia's appearance and character when he introduces her.

"In our telling, obviously Sophia is no English rose!" Wilde says. "She's fiery and has opinions, and she goes on this journey as a reaction against what her grandfather [Squire Western, played by Alun Armstrong] wants. In the script it doesn't feel like it's just Tom's story. It is balanced and you see how both of their journeys are equally important."

Nor is Solly McLeod your standard tousled rogue in a linen shirt and mud-spattered breeches. "I was absolutely determined that our Tom would be very young," Hughes says. "This book is about people who are just coming into adulthood: it's about the moment between puberty and marriage, where people are becoming adults and trying to make the decision of how to join the adult world. Tom's twenty. If he's twenty his behavior is entirely understandable."

Tom is also a child of nature. He's grown up among the servants and gamekeepers in the forests on Squire Allworthy's large estate.

"I kept saying he's got to look like the captain of the village cricket team," Hughes says. "He's got to be healthy-looking and kind of outdoorsy. We looked at hundreds of boys and they were lovely, good actors, but they just didn't have that look."

Enter McLeod. When he was called in to audition for Tom Jones his first thought was that he didn't look anything like the Welsh singer. "Then I read the script," he recalls, and realized, "Ohh, that Tom Jones."

McLeod was cast because he too is different. Told as decorously as possible that he is what the industry calls an unknown, he replies, "I am completely unknown! I started a theater course in 2020 that was shut off halfway through because of Covid. It was the only thing I did, like a weekend course, so it's crazy that it's led to this. I've always wanted to be an actor and that was luckily the springboard to get me a good agent and the jobs came flowing in." In the time since that casting, he's had small roles in House of the Dragon and Outlander, but Tom Jones marks his first lead.

It was precisely that freshness and honesty that endeared him to the producers and his castmates. Waddingham plays Lady Bellaston, the London socialite who falls for young Tom's charms.

"Solly is so natural. And so raw that you are along for the ride straight away. He's not like some typical pretty-boy, matinee-idol type that I always find a bit wet. And I love that they've gone to a hugely charismatic, endlessly watchable, gorgeous woman of color from Australia [Wilde] to play his young sparring partner. It's so beautifully informed by them to have gone and found her."

Waddingham has had a whale of a time playing her own character, a woman she reluctantly labels a "cougar" 250 years before the term was invented.

"She's such an over-the-top creation with this horrifically sybaritic lifestyle of debauchery. She kind of commandeers this young niece of hers, Sophia, and is immediately thrown off by how alluring this girl is. It's meant to be that Lady Bellaston finds Sophia a suitor, which she does — and then she meets the young, dashing Tom Jones. And perhaps for the first time Lady Bellaston's life goes slightly sideways and she doesn't quite know what to do with herself."

What Waddingham loved most, she says, was that Tom Jones was a production about a man that was written by, directed by and primarily interested in women. "Every time I work with a female director I get into a different way of looking at things than I might have done with a male director. I found it with Ted Lasso, with the thankfully large number of female directors we had. But with Georgia, we would go to dinner and chew the fat about where we wanted Bellaston to sit in terms of not being a stereotype in age or temperament."

And that's been the story with Tom Jones all around. It's a very old novel that, held up to the right lens by the right people, turns out to have a very modern sensibility.

Executive producers on Tom Jones are James Gandhi, Gwyneth Hughes, Damien Timmer and Helen Ziegler for Mammoth Screen, Susanne Simpson and Rebecca Eaton for Masterpiece and Polly Hill for ITV.

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #3, 2023, under the title, "Something Old Something New."