'Lucy Worsley Investigates' Season 2 Treats Historical Gore with Care

If you aren’t already familiar with historian and presenter Lucy Worsley, get ready to meet the only person on Earth who can make reading microfilm compelling. Worsley has presented British history documentaries on everything from Sherlock Holmes to Marie Antoinette. Her somewhat catchall series, Lucy Worsley Investigates, is back for a second season of tastefully handled historical gore and intrigue.

The show doesn’t have very clear parameters of topic or time period, so viewers might not know what to expect. Despite “investigates” in the title, Worsley examines more than historical cold cases. The show’s self-described objective is to “re-investigate some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters in British history.” In Season 1, this included episodes on Britain’s witch hunts, the Black Death, the murders of King Edward IV’s young sons, and King George III’s struggles with mental illness.

If topics like the Black Death and the witch trials sound too big for one episode of television, that’s because they are. But Worsley, ever the social historian, zooms in on stories of individuals illuminating more significant themes of the times. It appears that Season 2 has learned from Season 1’s heavier lifts, though, with each episode focusing on an individual person or discrete event rather than decades-long behemoths.

The first two episodes of Season 2 focus on Jack the Ripper and William the Conqueror. If you’re a history buff and you think you know these stories back to front, think again. If you think history is a snooze, think again. If you believe these stories are overdone and overly sensationalized, I tend to agree, but I urge you to think again. Worsley defies viewers’ expectations of these well-known historical people and events from the first episode. She clarifies that her take on Jack the Ripper isn’t another search for the identity of the infamous serial killer. 

Instead, she investigates how the public’s response to Jack the Ripper set the stage for the true crime genre as we know it today. Across the series, she speaks to experts whose diverse backgrounds offer new angles to old stories. Among them are a criminologist who works with violent offenders, an expert on historical sex work, and a specialist in medieval women’s history.

Worsley has a knack for helping viewers empathize with history’s most dehumanized, from superhuman kings to subhuman peasants. In the Jack the Ripper episode, she tells the audience, “I don’t just want to visit the places [the victims] died, but also where they lived.” She reconstructs aspects of the women’s lives, like their weddings, their homes, and the places where they socialized. In the William the Conqueror episode, Worsley visits a French castle and imagines what it would have been like for William to look out towards England. In that same episode, she uses the Bayeux Tapestry to imagine the experiences of Anglo-Saxon refugees from the Norman invasion.

Like much of Worsley’s work, Lucy Worsley Investigates isn’t sold as “women’s history,” but that doesn’t mean women’s stories are absent from the narrative. Quite the opposite, Worsley goes out of her way to understand women's lives in every time, place, or event she researches. In this way, she is furthering a quiet yet insistent campaign to recognize “women’s history” as simply history.

The rest of the series promises more fresh perspectives on well-trodden tales, with episodes on Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot and Mary Tudor, AKA Bloody Mary. However, due to the oddities of PBS scheduling, that final episode won't air until March 2025, so we'll be back to discuss the back half of the season when it arrives.

The first two episodes of Lucy Worsley Investigates Season 2 are available now on most local PBS stations, streaming on the PBS app, and on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. The penultimate episodes of Season 2 will air and stream on Tuesday, January 21, 2025, at 9 p.m. ET. (As always, check your local listings.) The Season 2 finale will debut on the other side of the pledge break in March 2025.

Lucy Worsley Investigates Season 1 is streaming for members on PBS Passport.