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Your reaction to the above double entendre will determine how much enjoyment you derive from Mary & George, Sky Atlantic’s irreverent, innuendo-laden historical drama about the Villiers starring Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine. Based on Benjamin Woolley’s non-fiction work The King’s Assassin, the new seven-part series dispenses with the formality and frippery often found in British period pieces in favour of bracing coarseness and a contemporary tone.
At its best this tale of powerplay and calculated courtship recalls Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite. Yet too often the show’s near giddy profanity and prurience seems to mistake juvenile vulgarity for a jaundiced worldview.
For all the steamy sex on display here, this is a story defined by a cold pragmatism. In the prologue scene, mother Mary (Moore) greets her newborn boy not with words of wisdom, but hard truths. “You are my second son . . . what use are you to anybody,” she coos.
As it turns out, George (Galitzine) grows into a winsome, intelligent man whom Mary — an arriviste married to an unremarkable aristocrat — tries to mould into a lover fit for a king (Tony Curran) with well-known predilections. Though she may claim to be securing a future for her son, it’s clear Mary is also exploiting him to compensate for a secret shame from her own past.
I’m not permitted to reveal more about what Mary and George are willing to do to raise themselves and undercut rivals. But it’s no spoiler to say that Moore is a magnetic presence. Relishing a script full of cutting lines, she delights with her deadpan delivery, enigmatic expressions and ability to tease out fragility from beneath a steely facade. Meanwhile Galitzine does well in a tricky role — playing someone who is both manipulator and manipulated.
Ultimately, the opening episodes are too sensational to convince as history and too lurid to satisfy as highbrow drama. But the charismatic performances, smatterings of wit and abundance of psychosexual titillation ensure the series does enough to attract our attention.
First episode on Sky Atlantic on March 5 at 9pm with all episodes on NOW thereafter; on Starz in the US next month
Original article posted on Financial Times.
