‘Renegade Nell’ Review — An Action-Packed Adventure Series

The Big Picture

• Renegade Nell
  blends familiar tropes into an entertaining adventure that feels like a breath of fresh air, with grounded magic and diverse casting.
• Louisa Harland’s portrayal of Nell showcases strength, determination, and justice, elevating the series beyond just action and magic elements.
• While the magical elements may feel repetitive, the engaging action, mystery, and character development make
  Renegade Nell
  a clever and worthwhile watch.

It feels bizarre to say that a series that features magic as a core, inextricable component can feel deeply grounded in reality. But such is the case with Renegade Nell, Disney+’s new series from Gentleman Jack creator Sally Wainwrightled by Derry Girls star Louisa Harland. It’s appropriate, perhaps, for a series whose central premise and plot resemble old ballads and poems of notorious highwaymen, those characters who are out on a quest for justice or revenge, with elements of danger, romance, mystery, and maybe even the supernatural thrown in.

What Renegade Nell, which premieres on March 29, truly does most successfully, however, is blending all of these elements together — tropes familiar to lovers of period pieces, historical fiction, even historical romance. In the process, the series comes up with an entertaining adventure that feels like a breath of fresh air, a spin on the familiar that puts a twist on things because they are beloved, and not trying to be different for the sake of it.

What Is ‘Renegade Nell’ About?

The Disney+ series follows Nell Jackson (Harland), a young woman who returns home to her village after her husband is killed at the front. But her homecoming isn’t entirely without incident, as she comes across highwaymen robbing a carriage and nearly falls prey to their violence as well — nearly, but not quite, because she is gifted with last-second assistance from Billy Blind (Nick Mohammed), a spirit who temporarily grants her supernatural fighting abilities.

These skills don’t come in handy, however, when, shortly after Nell arrives home, an attempt to seek justice for her family through official channels results in her being accused of murder instead by Thomas (Jake Dunn) and Sofia (Alice Kremelberg), the children of the local magistrate. Nell is then forced to go on the run with her sisters Roxy (Bo Bragason) and George (Florence Keen) to seek justice elsewhere, joined along the way by fellow highwayman Charles Deveraux (Frank Dillane), Thomas and Sofia’s servant Rasselas (Enyi Okoronkwo), and, eventually, a young noblewoman named Polly Honeycomb (Ashna Rabhenru). Complicating matters for them is the Earl of Poynton (Adrian Lester), who dabbles in the supernatural, and newspaper editor Lady Eularia Moggerhangar (Joley Richardson), who dabbles in sensationalist stories.

‘Renegade Nell’ Boasts a Diverting (and Diverse!) Cast

Although the show’s title and poster revolve around Louisa Harland’s Nell, the series is supported by an ensemble led by the strength of Harland’s performance. While this is a long way from her turn as the delightfully clueless Orla McCool in Derry Girls, Harland still makes expert use of her comedic timing, though in this latest outing, it tends more towards sarcastic than sweetly naive. There’s also a real strength about her that isn’t really showcased in Renegade Nell‘s marketing, which focuses more on the action side of things. Yes, the action scenes are important, and the premise of the show hinges on those scenes, but they are far from the most interesting thing about her as a character. Nell’s real strengths, the ones Harland delivers so well, are her sense of justice, and her determination to seek it even when the odds are unfair. It’s the way she does her best to fight back in times when Billy isn’t there to help her that really shows the kind of person she is.

Things may not be perfect yet, but the bar is officially set when it comes to colorblind casting in media. Gone are the lily-white depictions of history, and rightly so, as Nell and her sisters travel the countryside in the company of a diverse group of friends. Renegade Nell casts in a similar vein as its most famous contemporary, Bridgerton, opting for a hybrid colorblind approach: it matters sometimes, and other times it doesn’t matter in the slightest. This, to me, is at least an indication that things are moving in the right direction, but that creatives don’t fully realize how to fully commit to a colorblind approach. Introducing any question of bigotry into your world will necessarily bring about questions about how widespread it is. To dive fully into it is to get into spoiler territory, but as with Bridgerton, the way it is handled here feels like a stumble over a very well-intentioned block.

However, the inclusion of people of color in the lead ensemble is not the only sort of representation the series offers. Before this, Wainwright was most recently known for her series Gentleman Jack, which documents the life and times of Anne Lister, including a heavy emphasis on her relationship with another woman. This is all a very long-winded way to ask: does Renegade Nell feature explicit LGBTQ+ characters? Simply put, yes. The more complicated answer is that the adventure takes up so much time, there’s little time to devote to actual romantic relationships or the exploration of anyone’s explicit queer identity. Not that any of that stops Nell and Ashna Rabhenru’s Polly Honeycomb from engaging in a little flirtation. The series might end on an emotionally satisfying note, but should they get a second season, I would love the chance for that dynamic to be explored a little further.

‘Renegade Nell’s Engaging Adventure Offsets the Unbalanced Magic

To be absolutely clear, I am not the sort of person who needs magic over-explained to me in fiction. I don’t need a training montage to accept that the main character can perform feats of athleticism, I don’t need to be sat down and given the hard limits of magic in any given world. But if the worldbuilding of Renegade Nell falters at all, it’s in how the magic is — or more specifically, isn’t — heightened as the season goes on. Nell isn’t the only character in the series who has magical assistance, as Poynton and Sofia also engage in the practice in an effort to bring down Nell. But where their powers gradually evolve as the season goes on, Nell’s really don’t. Some of this, naturally, is because it’s not her power so much as it’s a power Billy Blind is temporarily lending her.

And that’s not even to say that this show necessarily needed Nell to power up incrementally, culminating in a superhero-style magic battle with Poynton and Sofia at the end. In fact, I can say that that would absolutely have been the wrong choice, and would have majorly harmed the show. That said, the use of Billy’s magic plays out so similarly that it almost becomes repetitive. Perhaps it’s intended to serve as a commentary in that the stories and songs about Nell become more outlandish, even as her actions don’t, which is an interesting story choice, but not a particularly interesting visual.

That said, the action, mysteries, and storylines that surround the magic are interesting enough to make up for this feeling fairly one-note. Arguably, the series often thrives despite the magical element, rather than because of it — though it is refreshing to see Nick Mohammed play such a bubbly character after his much more serious turn in the final season of Ted Lasso. The adventurous side of things, be it increasingly scrappy, resourceful plots or Nell’s increasing notoriety as a (possibly demonic) highwayman, makes for solid entertainment, and each member of the ensemble gets their chance to shine as the stakes grow larger and larger.

The series poses a lot of fascinating questions about justice, who actually gets to seek it, and what it means to do the right thing, and it’s through this that Nell gets the chance to have a satisfying character arc and Renegade Nell manages to tell an emotionally-satisfying, action-packed story. This is a series for those of us who longed for our resourceful, intelligent heroines to take center stage in adventure stories, but who also don’t buy into a “not like other girls” mentality. It’s for those of us who grew up with books like L.A. Meyer‘s Bloody Jack series and wanted to see something like that onscreen. Renegade Nell is clever, well-paced, funny, and well worth the watch.

Renegade Nell premieres on Disney+ on March 29.

Watch on Disney+