'The Forsytes' Season 1 Finale Steps on the Gas
A drama-filled finale leaves the family reeling from multiple scandals.
Well, at least no one can say the first season of The Forsytes was boring. The season finale, a car crash of an hour that sees at least a half-dozen major plot twists and relationship disasters, is...well, let’s just say it certainly opens up a lot of doors for where the show might go next. The only problem is that it’s left us with almost no one we can feel all that great about rooting for as it does so.
Jo leaves his wife for a life of adultery and poverty with Louisa and their children, quitting his job in the process and recommitting himself to life as an artist. Soames essentially decides that keeping Irene prisoner is romantic, just as his new bride forges a particularly dangerous connection with June’s fiancé, Phillip. Frances is (understandably) self-medicating to get through the day. Even family matriarch Ann doesn’t escape unscathed, secretly funneling money to a man — the Henry Falconer we heard so much about last week — that she suddenly reveals is secretly her grandson.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this family is a mess. And what’s worse, they’re not even messy in a fun way.
(Genuinely, I’m five minutes away from writing fanfic where all the women in the family move into a women-only commune, with Jolyn Sr. as a sort of male mascot. Everyone else can pretty much rot.)
We all expect period dramas like The Forsytes to be full of drama. That’s kind of the whole point. But it’s hard to care about any of these relationships when every single character is either demonstrably miserable or a huge jerk. (Except Monty, probably, who is likely dumb and self-serving enough to be enjoying all this.)
Season 1’s biggest problem is also this finale’s biggest issue: Jo. The writing really isn’t doing Danny Griffin any favors, given that it hasn’t provided Jo’s character much in the way of interiority or nuance, nor has it done any work to flesh out his relationship with Louisa in any real way. Instead, there’s just a lot of telling instead of showing: Jo wants to be a father, Jo’s still in love with his ex, Jo hates his job, Jo feels bad about leaving his wife, but not that bad, as it turns out. And nothing in Griffin’s performance really conveys any of the tension in any of these choices.
He essentially delivers the news that he’s quitting the family business and moving in with his mistress in the same cadence he uses when discussing the ethics of banking. This is meant to be our romantic lead? The show sure seems to think so. As Jo swoops into the house that he’s bought for Louisa, eager to tell her that he’s left all that messy Forsyte business behind and is ready to embrace genteel poverty in the name of his art, it’s actually difficult not to laugh.
This is supposed to be the season’s big romantic coda: Jo and Louisa finally kiss, a family reunited as he returns to the dreams he abandoned so long ago. But instead, it just feels like a weird sort of lower-class cosplay. Jo’s never faced a consequence for anything in his life, let alone gone without. He has no idea what it even means to be poor! Heck, the only reason he can embrace his bohemian dream is that the same family wealth he sneers at already bought them the house they’re living in.
It’s not like Soames’ turn to the dark side is any more appealing, but at least The Forsytes put some work into building up to it. He’s been an obsessive control freak throughout the show’s first season, and has clearly been spiraling over Irene’s independent mindset for several episodes.
Now, not content with simply thwarting his wife’s dream of dancing professionally, Soames starts taking steps to isolate Irene from the few relationships she’s building within the family, forcing her to leave dinner parties earlier, engaging Phillip to design them the kind of massive country pile that will keep her out of the city forever, and basically admitting that he’s never going to be willing to let her go no matter how unhappy she might be.
Irene, for her part, is growing increasingly desperate — and Millie Gibson really does give great tragic heroine vibes — begging to be released from her marriage and spilling her guts to Phillip about how little she wants to be forced into what is essentially exile.
Their immediate connection puts viewers in an intriguingly conflicted position. Gibson and Flatters have surprising chemistry, and their characters — both of whom are working class — have much more in common with one another than either of the Forsytes they’re romantically paired with. But, are we really supposed to be desperate enough for Irene’s freedom that we’re rooting for Phillip to break June’s heart? June, the one character on this canvas who hasn’t actually wronged anyone? Who hasn’t even read Jo the riot act for the way he’s been treating her mom?
As for Frances, well. She ends the season dumped, alone, and socially humiliated when Jo doesn’t show for the big gala party the Forsytes are throwing. She puts on a brave face, making a massive donation to the charity for fallen women that Lady Cateret’s been sneering at her for, and smiling through the pain. But where on Earth does she go from here? She’s stuck in a horrifying limbo, unable to move forward even as she must watch her husband move on with another woman, and forced to bear the judgment of both his family and society at the same time.
At this point, maybe she and Jolyn Sr. should just give it a go. It would hardly be the strangest thing that’s going on in this family. We’ll have to see what happens in Season 2.
The Forsytes will return for Season 2 in 2027. Season 1 is currently streaming on the PBS app, PBS Passport, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel.
