| (season one) |
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| Tony McNamara, 2020 |
I watched this after seeing a recommendation from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, though I can’t find the link now because when you search on “kareem abdul-jabbar great” you just get a gazillion articles about what a great basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was. Not so great at recommending TV shows I end up liking, though. I mean, I wasn’t going to watch this entirely on his say-so, but when I saw that it was a show about Catherine the Great, I thought I’d give it a go. I liked The Tudors, so much so that I rewatched the whole thing earlier this year. The Borgias wasn’t bad either, and I vaguely recall liking Rome quite a bit as well, back in the day. So, sure, bring on another pop history show, especially if it comes backed by some acclaim! Maybe I’d learn some pre-Soviet Russian history for good measure.
Or not. The title card comes with an asterisk billing the show as “an occasionally true story”, disclaiming fidelity to history. It also suggests that viewers are in for a cheeky comedy, but while The Great is indeed a comedy, it generally shoots well past “cheeky” and into “garish” or even “crass”. The laughs, if you do laugh, tend to come from a place of “ha ha, wow, I can’t believe someone actually said that”. Heck, sometimes the shock isn’t even in the service of shock humor—it’s just straight grotesquerie. But most of the shock has a lot of overlap with Pattern 45: what makes us gasp, and is supposed to make us laugh, is just how awful most of these people are. This is especially true of Catherine’s husband Peter. In actual history, Peter III, grandson of Peter the Great, ruled Russia for a grand total of six months before being overthrown by Catherine. The Peter is this show is not Peter the Great’s grandson but his son, and Catherine has not been his wife of sixteen and a half years when he rises to the throne; he’s already emperor when Catherine arrives for their arranged marriage. And, okay, that’s fine—sure, streamline things a bit for dramatic purposes. McNamara wanted to put forward a Catherine who starts off as an innocent with romantic ideas about the shape her life will take, and that does work better if she’s freshly arrived. And McNamara gets right to work shattering Catherine’s naïveté, as Peter turns out to be a vile, callow monster: punching his courtiers, fucking their wives, demanding everyone laugh at his jokes, casually sending nobles off to be tortured and commoners to be burnt alive, etc. And I thought, all right, I know Catherine is going to get him out of the way pretty much immediately, so I can see how it was important to quickly establish him as utterly loathsome so that we cheer her on as she engineers her coup. I was looking forward to watching her turn the tables on Peter, forcing him to sign articles of abdication and then sending him off to die, maybe at the end of the third episode or thereabouts, so that the real action of the series could begin—after all, Catherine ruled for thirty-four years. But episode after episode passed and Peter didn’t seem to be going anywhere—if anything, the show seemed to be trying to establish a love-hate relationship between Peter and Catherine and place it at the center of the show. The coup finally happens in the very last episode of the season, but the outcome is ambiguous. After I’d finished the first season, I went to IMDb and discovered that the actor who plays Peter appears in twenty-nine of the thirty episodes in the series. So I don’t see myself continuing with this. Pretty much from the moment Peter appeared, I wanted that vile monster gone, and I’d thought that the historical record offered some assurances that it wouldn’t be long until the vile monster was gone. But apparently that’s not how life works.
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