It doesn’t take long to realize that “Taboo,” the heavy-breathing new FX series set in Regency England, is going to be very ripe viewing. Rain on the moors, tubs of offal, bodies with coppers on the eyes, grave robbers, a funeral procession led by a dwarf — we’re talking the whole dark-gothic playbook. And that’s before we get to the half-sibling incest and the slave ship flashbacks and the Native American incantations.

But the most self-consciously gloomy thing about “Taboo,” which begins its eight-episode run on Tuesday, is its star, Tom Hardy, who created the show with his father, Chips Hardy, and the writer and producer Steven Knight. (Mr. Knight worked with Tom Hardy on “Peaky Blinders,” another highly stylized British period piece.) As James Keziah Delaney, who returns to London from abroad to reclaim his family legacy, Mr. Hardy growls, rasps, glowers and, when Delaney is caught without an answer, makes a popping noise that resembles a grunt.

Delaney represents a disruptive, democratic force in this melodrama of ideas. It’s in his blood — he’s the son of a British merchant and an American Indian mother — and it’s in the surly, barbaric manner he displays after sojourns in Africa and America, where he’s assumed to have “gone native” (although Delaney also possesses a superspy-style competence that’s at odds with the rest of the material). It’s also right there in the plot: England and America are fighting the War of 1812, and Delaney has just inherited the title to a piece of land in Canada, coveted by both sides. He appears willing to play them off against each other, loyalty to the crown be damned.

This aspect of the story is loosely based on real history, and the Nootka Sound that Delaney owns is a real place on Vancouver Island. It could be the basis for an absorbing story, and the best parts of “Taboo” in the first three episodes take place in the boardroom of the East India Company. There, Jonathan Pryce, as the company’s chairman, presides in highly entertaining fashion over the gargoylish protectors of multinational privilege who want to get their hands on Nootka Sound, preferably over Delaney’s dead body.