Summary
Sophie Turner is impressive in the premiere of Joan, but the show can be a touch heavy-handed.
Sophie Turner’s post-Game of Thrones career hasn’t exactly been prolific, which is surprising. Anyone who survives eight seasons of that show – especially the last one! – can be turned into a real star. Joan, might be the right vehicle for her. She’s great in Episode 1, delivering a chameleonic performance as Joan Hannington, a real-life 80s jewel thief.
This is the kind of show that requires its lead to look and sound different in almost every scene. The first one is telling. It finds Joan sitting in a hotel room putting on makeup, jewelry, and a wig, reinventing herself in real-time while the deep scars on her back serve as a reminder of something painful lurking underneath. Joan flits between a posh accent and a broad cockney one. She carries herself differently as she strides from a swanky hotel and into the back of a waiting car than she does when we cut to four months earlier, where she’s a cowed domestic abuse victim on the Kent coast.
Joan has a daughter, Kelly, whose father Gary is a dodgy thug who can’t explain why he has expensive furs in the back of his car, leaves Kelly alone in the apartment when he’s supposed to be looking after her, and pins Joan against the wall when she questions why he needs to leave with a suitcase in quite a rush.
Gary’s behavior hasn’t gone unnoticed. He’s being investigated by a policeman named Tom, who’s undercover as a double glazing salesman and wants Joan to tip him off about an apparent “big job”, and some armed men turn up at Joan’s place in the night, hold her at gunpoint, and demand to know where Gary is.
Knowing she’s in danger, Joan takes Kelly to Social Services to be sheltered by a foster family, and this is where I had that thought about Sophie Turner’s career. She really is quite good here, and the emotional turmoil of knowing she has to keep her daughter safe but not having any options beyond volunteering her to the state is a great way of making us empathize with Joan’s rapid turn into illegality.
Joan | Image via ITV
The main worthwhile counter-argument against Episode 1 is that it makes Joan almost cartoonishly put-upon to justify that slide into jewel thievery. She already has a strong motivation, but a good chunk of the episode is devoted to motivating her even further. She gets a job and a place to stay at her sister’s salon but then ruins that gig by putting chewing gum in a flirty client’s hair and stealing a car to see Kelly. One night, Gary turns up and holds a pair of scissors to her throat.
Joan getting into jewelry is a result of her sister Nancy pushing her to get another job since she’s too unreliable to work in the salon. Joan’s ingenuity is shown when she adopts a fake accent to pose as a hoity-toity woman buying a gift to learn about diamonds, then uses the knowledge she gleans to secure a job at Bernard Jones Jewellers.
But Bernard Jones is, again, awful. He flirts and fondles and tries to make Joan taking an advance on her wages contingent on how well they “get on” during a stock take that is a thinly veiled opportunity for him to try and force himself on her. Joan comes up with an excuse and leaves, but not before swallowing a few diamonds she steals from the open safe.
It’s an impulse decision, not just a potential solution to her problems but also a way to spite Jones, who’s grim. It’s quite by chance that in the pub that evening Joan meets Boisie, a handsome antique dealer who buys her a drink, then a few more, and then takes her home (she wakes up on the sofa, clothed, so Boisie is one of the only men she has met who hasn’t tried to take advantage of her – not physically, anyway.)
Joan uses the facilities to sink a bottle of olive oil and part with the diamonds, which thankfully occurs off-screen. She takes them to Boisie, who already had a sense that she was up to no good since she had, while drunk, told him basically her entire life story, and he agrees to help her sell them. But on one condition – he needs her for a job, and I don’t think he means running the shop.
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