Review of Shardlake

I watched the series but haven't read the books. There are some inaccuracies but having black actors play characters in the show isn't one. People seem to think that there were no black people living in England in Tudor times but there were. Try using a search engine and you will find many articles on the topic. In fact, for me the floppy hair of the side kick was more annoying than having black actors - they just acted well, especially the actor playing the Abbot. My main difficulty was with the theological inaccuracies, eg a statue in the background in one scene of episode 3 of the Sacred Heart of Jesus when the veneration for this image of Christ didn't start until the 17th Century or Jerome complaining about Cromwell moving away from the true faith (Catholic, with allegiance to the Pope) while also asserting that Cromwell had murdered the queen (Anne Boleyn, Protestant) when Catholics of the time didn't recognise her as the queen as she had pushed out Catherine of Aragon, considered the true queen. The show missed a lot of the complexity of the Reformation (which I can understand) but in doing so it seemed to undermine itself in terms of the plot. Having said that, Arthur Hughes is brilliant in it giving a very nuanced performance.