SCORES:
Value: 5
Entertainment value: 1
HE SAW
There are a lot of things I dislike about this show. The story is weak, the jokes are bad and it contains more total minutes of bad acting than any show I can remember. After episode one - and again after episodes two through four - I wanted to turn it off and never turn it back on again. I convinced Zanna we should skip episode five and only watch the last few minutes of episode six to find out what happened but that was out of professional obligation, not because I cared.
Zanna had a lot to say after it finished and I kept waiting for a break in her monologue because I needed to go to the toilet. I had got up off the couch and was standing in the middle of the lounge. I was jiggling up and down and had both my hands on my butt. Did she not notice or was she being deliberately obtuse? I don't believe I could have made my needs more obvious but she wouldn't stop speaking. Eventually, I had to interrupt her. I stayed in the toilet so long that when I came out she had already gone to bed. That wasn't necessarily my aim but I wouldn't say I was unhappy about it. The next morning, almost as if we had never slept, she started talking about the show again. I can't for the life of me recall what she said but I would never argue with her right to say it.
Much of the press attention on The Duchess has focused on the fashion choices of its main character, which are opulent and extravagant and typically very expensive-looking. I get now, because I've now read many of these articles, that the style is a political statement. It's a rebuke to the televisual stereotyping of single mothers, who are typically depicted as sloppy and messy and unable to get properly dressed. I love a good political statement and when I discovered this one, it made me feel bad about all the terrible things I said earlier about the show, despite the fact they're true.