How ‘Masterpiece’ Turned ‘Tom Jones’ into a Romantic Romp for 2023

Masterpiece on PBS’s latest period drama might have taken some viewers by surprise. Tom Jones is a brand new adaptation of Henry Fielding’s saucy 18th century book of the same name. Over the centuries, the novel has inspired an Oscar-winning film, multiple TV adaptations, and questions about its womanizing eponymous character.

Tom Jones (Solly McLeod) is a handsome foundling who spends an idyllic childhood raised by Squire Allworthy (James Fleet), the kind nobleman who discovered him as an abandoned baby. His fate takes a turn as he is kicked out of his home and left to make his own fortune. Along the way, Tom falls in and out of bed with a variety of women, all while pining for his true love, Sophia Western (Sophie Wilde).

Since its 1749 debut, Tom Jones‘s reputation as a novel has been intertwined with its frank sexual content. Would a lascivious story about a rakish young man sleeping his way through a variety of female characters work for a 2023 Masterpiece audience? Did Tom’s exploits objectify his partners in a way that wouldn’t sit right today?

As it happens, Masterpiece head Susanne Simpson thought Tom Jones was a perfect fit for the beloved PBS show’s audience.

“You know, the novel, Tom Jones, it truly is a romantic comedy,” Simpson told Decider during PBS’s visit to the Television Critics Association Winter 2023 Press Tour. “The sexual encounters that Tom has with women characters are really comedic in a way. They’re meant to be funny. They’re meant to be joyful. And I think because these sexual encounters have that kind of comedic and joyful effect, they really come across very easily for the audience.”

Ironically, the writer of this latest adaptation of Tom Jones needed more convincing. Gwyneth Hughes told Decider that she hadn’t read the book before working on this project and her own preconceptions almost got in the way.

“I thought it would all be randy and unpleasant, but then, I read it and I was just blown away. I thought it was extremely funny and entertaining and romantic,” Hughes said.

Executive Produer James Gandhi of Mammoth Screen brought Tom Jones to Hughes after they had wrapped working on another massive period adaptation for Prime Video, Vanity Fair.

“We were finishing [Vanity Fair] and panicking and thinking, ‘Oh my God, what we can do with Gwyn next? Because she’s so amazing. How can we tempt her to keep working with us?’” Gandhi told Decider. “And then we were looking at lots of books and Tom Jones [came up] and we thought, ‘Oh, that’s mad. We shouldn’t do that.’ And then it felt a bit scary. So we thought we should do that.”

Ironically the only person who didn’t find the text of the novel all that inspiring was the project’s actual Tom Jones, Solly McLeod, who admitted to Decider he couldn’t make it through Fielding’s tome.

“I tried to read the book. I went out and bought a really nice copy of the book and I was like, ‘Cool, I’m gonna sit down and get into the character,'” McLeod said. “I got ten pages in and he was still describing the trees and I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ I just, I don’t think I can do this, the chaotic language and the depth. It’s very dense writing, which is beautifully written.”

“I thought, ‘Okay, well, I’m just going to use the scripts that Gwyn has very, very cleverly adapted.'”

Gandhi also praised the way Gwyneth “Gwyn” Hughes masterfully adapted Fielding’s 18th century novel for a 21st century audience.

“[Hughes] makes all the other characters feel so rounded and brilliant,” Gandhi said. “She really wanted to tap into how it’s relevant to today. How it’s hard being a 20-year-old man or woman in society today and knowing what your place is in the world. I think she really manages to make it feel incredibly modern and also — she’s funny. It’s really funny.”

Hughes did make at least two major changes to the story in her adaptation. Both concerned Tom’s primary love interest, Sophia Western. Tom Jones is famous not only for its randy sexuality, but also its hilarious narrator.

“It’s Henry Fielding himself telling you the story and it’s dead funny, but it also gets in the way really of telling the unfolding story,” Hughes said. Her solution? Give key voiceover moments to Sophia Western.

“It wasn’t that I meant to replace him with Sophia. It’s just as we started working on it, I just was hearing her voice. And it’s partly because she’s really the heroine of the story,” Hughes said. “Okay, it’s called Tom Jones. It’s about Tom, but in a novel you can do that thing where central characters are someone to whom things happen. In the movies, it’s kind of against the rules.”

“It’s just so much Sophia’s story. Not just equal to him and we’re not just making a feminist point here, but because she drives the action, really. He gets thrown out of home; she chooses to leave home and leave behind everything she ever knew to follow him. It’s a different thing.” 

Fans of Fielding’s book will also notice that Sophia Western is the biracial granddaughter of Squire Western (Alun Armstrong), freed from slavery as a child and sent from Jamaica to England upon her father’s death.

“I have to say Henry Fielding had no Black characters. There is no slavery story in Tom Jones.” Hughes then cheekily added, “I don’t think he’d mind.“

Hughes explained that in adapting the very white book for 2023, she and her fellow producers were eager to diversify the cast to reflect modern demographics.

“We all want to do this. We all want to produce a more interesting, diverse, ‘reflective of our modern society’ show. So we all signed up to that. It’s great,” she said. “So we looked at what should we do: Should we have a Black Tom?”

The problem there was that a key part of Tom Jones focuses on the mystery of the young man’s true paternity.

“So I think if he was a Black lad, a biracial lad, I think they can notice the only Black guy walking to the village, no mystery about who his father was,” Hughes said. “So it became Sophia, obviously.”

“There was an overall decision that she should be a woman of color and I went looking for how to make that work historically and came upon what you obviously already know: In Jamaica, there was this fantastic, interesting thing about how men fathered children and they were their only children. So they valued them and they sent them to England to be educated and, and left their estates for them.”

“We had it. We had a real proper 18th century story for our Sophia to inhabit.”

The producers of Tom Jones hope that audiences embrace these new takes on Tom, Sophia, Squire Allworthy, and the rest of Fielding’s iconic characters. Most of all, the team behind Masterpiece’s latest romance hopes that viewers have fun.

“We worked for many, many years working on the script and getting it to a really good place and then the pandemic hit,” Gandhi said. “And it felt nice [to finally make Tom Jones].”

“What we really need is some sunshine and fun.”

Tom Jones Episode 2 will premiere Sunday, May 7 on Masterpiece on PBS. All four episodes are available to stream on the PBS Passport app.