Everything To Remember Ahead of 'Hotel Portofino' Season 2
It's been a minute since PBS checked into Hotel Portofino, the British drama set on the Italian coast during the 1920s. Themed as a series about the personal awakenings of its main characters, especially Bella Ainsworth (Natascha McElhone), an upper-class woman of a certain age, who leaves the U.K. after the death of her youngest child drives her to try for a fresh start and open a hotel business for the wealthy as the aristocracy collapses back home, it was filled with the small-time dramas of both those who worked and played there, from the staff members to the guests, while the creeping fascist that would soon take over the whole of Italy state nipped at their heels.
The series' opening episode established this as the sort of show where nothing of particular import seems to happen in any specific installment. Yet, when all is said and done, radical change has somehow crashed over everyone involved. The premiere mainly busied itself in introducing the cast of characters gathered at this particular establishment in the summer of 1926 for various reasons, starting with Bella, her no good con-man of a husband Cecil (Mark Umbers), her "passionate artist" failson Lucian (Oliver Dench), trying to avoid marriage and her equally faildaughter Alice Mays-Smith (Olivia Morris), widowed in the Great War with no particular aim in life.
Bella's staff are not much better than her family; there's cook Betty Scanlon (Elizabeth Carling) and her son Billy (Louis Healy), who at least has the good sense to discover garlic and olive oil make everything better, and nanny Constance March (Louisa Binder), who clearly has a child out of wedlock back home that the show is trying to pretend is a mystery. There's also Anish Sengupta (Assad Zaman), who isn't technically staff, but since he's not white, everyone assumes he is. He's Lucian's BFF (and also clearly not straight); he has a medical license, so he winds up being the hotel's doctor on call by default.
