Decoding racism

Carnival Row (2019) is an urban fantasy television series that has a complex narrative architecture employing major plotlines from at least three distinct genres of fiction. My interest is in the first season, which was released in August 2019, and comprises eight episodes, each of which runs from 60 to 67 minutes (at the time of writing, there is a second season in production). The season opens as a postcolonial epic, focusing on protagonist Vignette Stonemoss (played by Cara Delevingne), a faerie who flees from her native land of Tirnanoc (from the Gaelic Tír na nÓg) to seek asylum in the city state of the Burgue. While the ship in which she is travelling is sinking, a murder mystery begins in the Burgue, introducing a second protagonist, Rycroft Philostrate (played by Orlando Bloom), a police inspector. The postcolonial epic and murder mystery are linked by a paranormal romance between Vignette and Philo, which is represented as an interspecies romance until it is revealed that Philo himself is an interspecies hybrid, with a human father and faerie mother. The three major plotlines are further intervolved by the addition of two minor plotlines, one political and one social, each concerned with an elite Burgue family, the Breakspears and the Spurnroses respectively. Absalom Breakspear (played by Jared Harris) is Chancellor of the Republic and siblings Ezra and Imogen Spurnrose (played by Andrew Gower and Tamzin Merchant) the owners of Vignette's indenture.

The minor and major plotlines are linked by means of the Burgue itself and the series takes its title from a street in the Burgue that is the centre of what has become a Fae inner city, populated by faeries, fauns, centaurs, trolls, kobolds, and other refugees from Tirnanoc.

In Carnival Row, the actual plot – the movement from the inaugural to the inevitable that constitutes the literal meaning of the narrative – is only revealed in the final episode. Sophie Longerbane (played by Caroline Ford), the daughter of the Leader of the Opposition in parliament, initiates her play for control of the Burgue by blackmailing the Chancellor's wife, Piety Breakspear (played by Indira Varma), sending her a faked letter from a famous Fae singer claiming that she had a child with Breakspear.