Bittersweet: BritBox Stirs Up “The Cadburys,” a Chocolate Dynasty Drama With Real Bite

There is a version of this show that is pure comfort viewing, all copper vats and rolling Birmingham smoke and plucky Victorians inventing the candy bar. BritBox is clearly making some of that. But the source material for The Cadburys is Deborah Cadbury’s Chocolate Wars, a book about Quaker idealists trying to get rich without losing their souls, and if the six-part drama has half the nerve of its origin story, this could be considerably more interesting than a cozy Sunday-night confection. Production is underway in Birmingham, the casting is set, and the ingredients are genuinely promising.

The Brothers and the Failing Cocoa Works

The setup is real history, and it is a good one. In 1861, two young brothers inherited their father’s collapsing Birmingham cocoa business. Richard Cadbury, played here by Toby Regbo of Outrageous, and George Cadbury, played by Harry Gilby of Boarders, had no obvious reason to succeed. Chocolate as we know it did not exist yet. Their firm was losing money. Their strict Quaker upbringing had taught them that indulging the senses was close to a sin, which is a genuinely funny handicap for men about to build an empire on pure pleasure.

They did it anyway, and the details are exactly the kind of thing a period drama should be feasting on. The Cadburys gave the Victorian public its first mass-market Easter eggs and fancy boxes, then took the fortune and built Bournville, a model village on the edge of Birmingham designed to lift their workers out of slum poverty. Pearce Quigley plays patriarch John Cadbury, the man who started it all and nearly lost it.

The Chocolate Wars Were Real, and So Was the Romance

Here is the hook the series is built around, and it is a beauty. Cadbury’s chief rivals, Fry’s and Rowntree’s, were also Quaker family firms. These were competitors who prayed at the same meetings, shared the same convictions about poverty and social reform, and then went at each other’s throats over market share. Ben Hardy plays Francis Fry, and Mathew Baynton, of Ghosts, turns up as Joseph Rowntree.

Into that rivalry the show drops sister Maria Cadbury, played by Jessica Barden of Dune: Prophecy, who falls in love with Francis Fry and is forced to pick a side. Romeo and Juliet, but the feuding houses are competing chocolate dynasties and everyone involved is a devout pacifist. That is a fantastic engine for a drama, and it hands Barden, one of the sharpest young actors working, the most interesting part in the ensemble.

Quaker Capitalism Is the Secret Ingredient

If The Cadburys is smart, and the involvement of writer Chloë Mi Lin Ewart and a Fable Pictures team that includes Freddie Highmore as an executive producer suggests it might be, the real subject here is not chocolate at all.

The Quaker chocolate barons genuinely believed a business could be a force for moral good. They wrote papers on poverty, campaigned against human rights abuses, and built entire towns for their workers, all while trying to out-sell one another. It is a story about whether you can compete ruthlessly and stay decent, which is not a question that has aged a day. Deborah Cadbury, a descendant of the family, wrote her book with clear eyes about the tensions, including the uncomfortable questions the family faced over cocoa sourcing and forced labor at the turn of the century.

The press release calls the series warm-hearted, and it will be. But the material underneath it has an edge, and the best British period dramas are the ones that let the sweetness and the rot share a frame. There is real potential here for something with a bit of bitterness in the blend, which is, after all, what makes good chocolate work.

Familiar Faces in the Mix

BritBox has assembled a cast that will land instantly with anyone who watches this sort of thing. Beyond the leads, Joanna Scanlan brings her reliably great presence, Felicity Montagu of I’m Alan Partridge turns up as Mary Brown, and Poppy Gilbert plays Elizabeth Adlington. Regbo, notably, is fresh off BritBox’s own A Woman of Substance, which tells you the service has found a bench it likes and is running it back.

Directing duties are split between Tom McKay and Jill Robertson, with Sony Pictures Television handling worldwide sales and Creative UK backing the production through the West Midlands Production Fund. Shooting it in Birmingham, where the whole thing actually happened, is the correct and obvious call.

Worth the Wait

BritBox has been quietly assembling one of the more dependable prestige-period slates going, and a chocolate dynasty saga with a forbidden romance, a moral quandary at its center, and a genuinely great true story behind it is a smart addition to it. No premiere date yet, since cameras are only just rolling, but I will be watching for it.

Bring the Dairy Milk. This one earned its shelf space before a single frame was shot.