Somewhere in the prestige entertainment universe, there resides a cabal of viewers who would have liked 2018’s gonzo period piece The Favourite to last for the better part of nine hours. No other explanation could suffice for the existence of the new Hulu series The Great.
Created by The Favourite co-writer Tony McNamara, The Great stars Elle Fanning as Catherine II, the 18th-century princess who would go on, in real life, to become Russia’s longest-ruling female sovereign. Shipped to St. Petersburg at a tender but unspecified age, Fanning’s Catherine is at once artless and idealistic, a Rene Descartes-reading naif whose conjugal hopes (“You lie together … weeping occasionally with ecstatic joy”) are almost sensible when compared to her dreams for her adoptive country (“free bread and medicine for all”). Catherine’s husband, Peter III (Nicholas Hoult), is both her foil and tormentor, a deranged man-child whose entourage feeds vodka to pet ducks and induces servants to lick their feet. Having observed Catherine’s acquisition of a tame bear upon her arrival at the Winter Palace, canny viewers will only shake their heads at the predictability of it all when Peter shoots the beast dead near the end of the first episode.
Filling The Great’s magnificent halls is a collection of misfits and scoundrels whose lives consist, in large part, of throwing back drinks, shouting “huzzah,” and shattering their goblets on the floor. (The show enacts this sequence literally dozens of times.) Among these lords and attendants is Count Grigory Orlov (Sacha Dhawan), an awkward intellectual whom Catherine enlists to lead a coup against her unloving husband. Another, Archbishop “Archie” (Adam Godley), welcomes his new empress to the palace with a cringe-inducing virginity check. When, in episode three, Catherine makes known her marital dissatisfaction, the audience is introduced to Leo Voronsky (Sebastian de Souza), a handsome gentleman with whom Peter encourages his wife to have an affair. Or perhaps Catherine will sleep with Gen. Velementov (Douglas Hodge), the court whipping boy whose sexual interest in the empress is both played for laughs and not particularly funny.
Though most of The Great’s performances are single-note caricatures, two elements of its casting deserve some praise. The first is the show’s intriguing color blindness, a decision that results in courtiers of every hue and is at one with the program’s historical revisionism. (This is, after all, only “an occasionally true story.”) The second is the inclusion of rising British actress Phoebe Fox, whose previous credits include Black Mirror and Amazon’s The Aeronauts. As a former noblewoman reduced to servanthood, Fox is winningly composed in a court in which the prevailing condition is an allegedly comic stupidity. Consequently, hers are among the few scenes that are simultaneously light enough to amuse and sane enough to mean something.
It is exactly this balance, unfortunately, that the two leads are unable to strike. As the teenage Catherine, Fanning is humorously doe-eyed when lecturing her ministers (“Every Russian heart will be full of joy”) but far less convincing as a downtrodden wife and schemer. Chewing the scenery as Peter, Hoult is obviously enjoying himself, but his portrayal of the doomed prince is too broad to hold the viewer’s interest over time. Indeed, the flaws in Hoult’s performance are something of a microcosm for the show’s broader failures. It is occasionally amusing to watch the emperor chase his advisers through hallways while uttering ironic bons mots. (Sample quip: “Someone should work out what goes on between a chap and his mother. There’d be money in that.”) But if a show intends to go to market carrying only a certain manic absurdity in its pockets, it had better be damn funny.
The Great, I’m sorry to say, is not. Instead, what McNamara et al. have produced is a series that is insufferable precisely because its cartoonishness rarely provokes actual laughs. In The Favourite, a motion picture of standard length, the tone achieved by McNamara and director Yorgos Lanthimos was fresh enough to justify the entire project’s existence, an engaging corrective to the staid Merchant Ivory aesthetic that long dominated period filmmaking. In Hulu’s show, on the other hand, a nearly identical style is briefly clever, quickly tedious, and finally unwatchable. Even if The Great had actors on par with The Favourite’s Emma Stone and Olivia Colman, it wouldn’t work. The gag simply isn’t compelling enough to sustain a 10-episode television season.
Perhaps sensing as much, McNamara and his fellow writers attempt, from time to time, to present the viewer with misbehavior of a more severe kind than mere glass-breaking. Yet these darker scenes, as when Peter punches Catherine without warning, are, if anything, a compounding error. If Peter is a bore and a fool, we can scoff at his idiocy and look forward to his comeuppance. If he is a vicious misogynist, however, it is not just superfluous but grotesquely so that he is also a man with poor table manners.
Alas, The Great’s attempts to square this circle are entirely in vain, as, for the most part, are its far more numerous stabs at whimsy. The result is a show that lies on the screen like a heap of Russian caviar: enticingly rich, indisputably extravagant, but more than a little repulsive.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
