Sophie Turner officially enters her grown-up era with Joan

Sophie Turner has spent the first part of her career coming of age—initially in her phenomenal work as Sansa Stark on Game Of Thrones, then in her far more uneven turn as Jean Grey in the X-Men film series. Even her highly public pop-star marriage and divorce felt like it had the beats of a coming-of-age story, with eternal teen-girl icon Taylor Swift swooping in to save the day. Now, however, Turner is firmly entering her grown-up era with Joan, a British-American co-production loosely inspired by a real-life 1980s jewel thief named Joan Hannington. The story of a young mother stepping into her power, Joan is rooted more in crime-thriller tropes than young-adult ones. And while the series as a whole lacks a certain spark, it provides a strong platform to launch the next phase of Turner’s career.

In fact, casual fans might not even immediately recognize Turner, whose lanky blonde look makes her seem more like the long-lost sister of Elizabeth Debicki than the erstwhile Queen of the North. We first meet Joan as a working-class mom with a deadbeat boyfriend living in a rundown coastal town in Kent. Her aspirations of glamor are immediately apparent, however. She’s the sort of woman who squeals over diamonds and fur without particularly caring about how legally they were acquired. So when her husband’s criminal activities catch up to the family, Joan flees to London, gets a chic bob, and sets about trying to find a shortcut to amass her own wealth rather than relying on unreliable men to provide for her. 

A co-production of ITV and The CW, Joan feels more like a refined British import than the sort of soapy stuff The CW used to air back when it was regularly producing scripted content. But it does share The CW’s penchant for style. Maybe the most impressive thing about Joan is that it manages to make the tacky 1980s look genuinely glamorous. Joan instinctively understands that the first step toward living like the other half is to look like them. And Turner wears the hell out of some jewel-toned jumpsuits and cut-crease eyeshadow as Joan fakes her way into a job at a jewelers and starts looking for the chance to take some five-finger employee discounts. 

Joan’s cons become more elaborate once she meets a handsome, amoral antiques dealer named Boisie (Frank Dillane), who’s got deeper connections to the criminal underworld. Joan soon becomes a master of disguise, posing in whatever persona will get her close to the expensive item she wants to steal next: a bored, rich housewife with a taste for diamond rings; a lost hiker who just happens to stumble upon a wealthy estate; an art appraiser with an eye for 18th-century paintings. Turner is clearly having a blast getting to slip into so many different types of characters all in one series. And she’s equally great in the more conventional dramatic scenes with Joan’s young daughter Kelly (Mia Millichamp-Long), who she leaves in emergency foster care before fleeing Kent. Joan is a deeply caring mother but also a bit of an unsentimental one, and Turner plays that repressed emotion well. 

With its compelling subject matter, strong central performance, and great costuming, there is a lot about Joan that works. The trouble is the writing and direction seldom lives up to the potential of those compelling pieces. Though Turner does her best to sell the hypocritical push-pull between Joan’s crime addiction and her desire to create a normal, stable life for her daughter, the script struggles to dramatize that cognitive dissonance. Sometimes the show seems to want to be a grounded domestic drama about classism and other times a more heightened, aspirational Goodfellas for female jewel thieves. But while the cons get more elaborate, the characters are mostly stuck playing the same notes over and over again with very little in the way of subtext or critical perspective. 

That could be a matter of the show being too close to its subject matter. The six-episode series is adapted from Harrington’s 2002 memoir I Am What I Am: The True Story Of Britain’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief, and creator Anna Symon reportedly consulted with Harrington during the scriptwriting process as well. Perhaps that’s why the series struggles to portray Joan in the sort of unsympathetic light you need for a truly three-dimensional character study of a growing crime boss. Instead, it paints her as a victim of circumstances when it comes to her daughter and a #GirlBoss when it comes to her career in the sexist criminal underworld—choices that, ironically, rob her of the very agency Joan’s seeking to reclaim throughout the series. 

It doesn’t help that for all the style dripping from the costume design, the rest of the show lacks any real kind of visual pizzazz. The camerawork is staid and pedestrian, without the flash to match Joan’s glamorous cons. Apart from a few effectively staged heist sequences, the series struggles to find the right sense of pacing to match the energy of Joan’s deep dive into grand larceny. While the series is consistently watchable, it never quite manages to elevate itself to the level of truly great crime TV. 

It’s a balance the show could find in a potential second season, which the finale leaves open as a possibility. Turner certainly feels like she’s got more in the tank when it comes to playing this complicated crime figure. The series just needs to be willing to take Joan to task with the same equality she demands from her male counterparts.   

Joan premieres October 2 on The CW and hits BritBox on December 5