History, as they say, is not what it used to be. If you hanker for stately costume dramas, in which men see to the affairs of state and women glide around grand houses in improbable dresses, sorry, they’re not making those this season. If, on the other hand, your thing is lusty, frequently profane reinventions of the lives of the long-dead aristocracy, you’re in luck.
Mary & George is the story of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham and lover of King James VI, and his brutally ambitious mother Mary (Julianne Moore), who, finding herself widowed and financially bereft, sets about to engineer her very beautiful son (Nicholas Galitzine) into the King’s favours.
George doesn’t want to be shipped off to France to learn manners and buggery – he’s more interested in banging a local servant girl and sulking prettily – but he doesn’t have a lot of choice. Mother wants buggery and buggery she will have.
The clothes are spectacular but it’s the script – adapted by DC Moore (Killing Eve) from Benjamin Woolley’s non-fiction book The King’s Assassin – that really shows off.
“If you miss this chance, you will fail us all,” Mary warns her reluctant son in the opening episode. “And live, like your father, smeared in the unwashable excrement of eternal shame.” After her new husband Sir Thomas Compton – married to procure the necessary funds for George’s grooming as a royal companion – growls about the King’s current favourite and his campy retinue, “that surly sodomite Somerset and his Scottish semen-guzzlers,” she demurs: “So, you’d prefer we were ruled by our own plucky, home-grown sodomites?”
“It would be better,” he acknowledges.
It doesn’t seem an accident that Moore, more imperious and more spectacularly dressed as Mary gains more of the power she craves, has the best lines. She declared in an interview for the production that “that was part of the joy of working on this, to be able to say those really kind of insanely wonderful words.”
My Lady Jane is also based on a book – the first in the “Janies” series jointly authored by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows – but not one that makes any pretence towards non-fiction.
In this telling, Lady Jane Grey (Emily Bader) is, in keeping with history, married off by her scheming mother Lady Frances Grey (Anna Chancellor) to Lord Guildford Dudley (Edward Bluemel) in a complicated plot to generate a Protestant heir to the throne after the impending death of Edward VI, who is fading away with what was likely tuberculosis. She becomes, queen, briefly.
But in My Lady Jane, Jane is not beheaded shortly after taking the throne and Edward might not be quite as dead as supposed, either. Having thus broken with the historical record, the original book’s authors went for outright magic. A good number of the main characters turn out to be not regular humans, but Ethians, who have discovered in adolescence the mixed blessing of being able to transform back and forth into animals. Jane’s cousin Mary – the bloodiest of queens in the real history – hates Ethians.
Throw in Jane’s interest in medicine and her advanced-for-the-16th-century humanist philosophy (both plausibly based on the real Jane) and it’s very much the stuff of young adult fiction. But Gemma Burgess, who adapted the book, is regarded as a leading light in the “new adult” genre – think YA, but for women younger than 30 – and the language is not that of teenage fiction. This much is clear 30 seconds in after the narrator summarises the tragic story of the real Jane and declares “Fuck that!”
The first episode also introduces what seems set to be a theme: versions of British rock standards performed by young women. The British group Black Honey’s raucous version of The Troggs’ Wild Thing is a centrepiece of the first episode, which also goes out to an uncredited cover of Bowie’s Rebel Rebel. It’s not the same thing as Bridgerton’s classical interpretations of modern pop but it’s probably the closest My Lady Jane gets to expectations that it would be the next Bridgerton. It really isn’t.
So, there you have it: two shows that conjure with royal histories, one lusty and lavish, the other a kind of magical pop fiction. They have in common not just real royal inspirations, but, perhaps more than anything, terrible scheming mothers. If Lady Macbeth had been a real person, she’d have a lot to answer for.
Mary & George is on TVNZ+ from Wednesday, June 26; My Lady Jane is on Prime Video from Thursday, June 27.
