The Lady one of the more unsettling true crime dramas streams this spring. BritBox’s soapy series opens inside Buckingham Palace, reimagining the real case of Sarah Ferguson’s murderous assistant dresser.
Fergie (Natalie Dormer) hired Jane Andrews (Mia McKenna-Bruce), a young, suicidal woman struggling with complex personal issues, to help manage her public presentation and daily palace life. Andrews had a sharp eye for style and a weakness for men. She served Fergie for nine years, during which she gossiped openly about her employer’s many extramarital affairs and accumulated a thorough knowledge of palace secrets.
When Ferguson fired Andrews to cut costs, it was catastrophic for both of them. Andrews had believed, as her mother put it, that she was “set for life.” She was acutely aware she was disliked by staff, having overheard cruel remarks about her background and her perceived sense of royal belonging. Despite her vulnerabilities, she had built something at the palace. With her dismissal, it all collapsed.
Wonder Where You’ve Seen Them Before?
Mia McKenna-Bruce earned a BAFTA nomination for her lead role in the acclaimed 2023 film How to Have Sex. If you haven’t seen it, add it to your list.
Natalie Dormer is best known as the scheming Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones and Anne Boleyn in The Tudors. She has serious form playing complex women navigating powerful men.
Jane Andrews was convicted of the murder of Thomas Cressman in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison. She was released on parole in 2015 after 14 years, having been denied parole multiple times.
The Lady BritBox Review: Worth Watching?
A friend had once told Andrews, pre-Fergie, that she was “going nowhere.” With her dismissal, she found herself back in that place. She became obsessed with Tom Cressman, a financier, and their relationship quickly grew fraught. When he let her down, she broke into his home, trashed it, and made threats. Later, Tom was found murdered, stabbed to death in his sleep.
It is a genuinely creepy story. But The Lady tells it in a way that leans heavily on shock value, relies on conjecture, and ultimately undermines its central figure, a mentally unstable woman whose complexity deserves more careful handling. The series is inconsistent and frustrating in equal measure.
This one is not going to send you to bed feeling settled.
About the Series The Lady stars Natalie Dormer as Sarah Ferguson and Mia McKenna-Bruce as Jane Andrews. It streams on BritBox from March 18.
The Lady begins streaming on BritBox on March 18.
