Parade's End (Season 1)

Parade's End (2012) is an HBO and BBC Two mini-series you can watch online on iFILM. Tom Stoppard wrote the five-episode screenplay from Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy — a slow-motion portrait of the British upper class coming apart at the seams.

Christopher Tietjens is the last principled Edwardian left in England: intelligent, rigid, honourable in a way nobody around him finds useful anymore. His wife Sylvia is ferocious and fashionable and has spent their marriage methodically dismantling him — apparently because she can. Then the war pulls Tietjens to France. Left behind in London is Valentine, a suffragette he refuses to let himself want. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Tietjens as a man whose dignity is the cage he built himself. Rebecca Hall is terrifying as Sylvia — the kind of performance where you watch her and feel vaguely guilty for understanding her. Adelaide Clemens, Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett, and Roger Allam complete a cast with no weak links. Directed by Susanna White with no sentimentality to spare. Stream Parade's End (2012) on iFILM.