A cute marketing exercise for Sky’s Mary & George asked its ruff-wearing cast to describe the drama in three words. Most went for “sex”. Star Nicholas Galtizine went for both “sexy” and “sex” (although he feasibly could have gone for “cheekbones” and “smouldering” to round things out).
They’re not wrong. There is a lot of sex in this period romp about Mary and George Villiers, the real-life mother and son who schemed and shagged their way to the very top of the Jacobean court to hold fearsome influence over king and country.
It’s a dazzling tale, sensationally told and gleefully led by Julianne Moore as Mary, a self-made social climber whose ruthless ambition stems from knowing that womanhood in early 1600s England was a rotten lot.
Entirely dependent on the men in her life, she recognises that her second son George (Galitzine) might be destined for great things, if he’ll only stop being such a wet blanket. She unceremoniously packs him off to France to learn how to be a gentleman (among other things) and on his triumphant return, the pair do everything they can to get him in front of King James I (Tony Curran), a volatile “horny-handed horror” with a taste for pretty young men.
Galitzine is stupidly good-looking in a role that necessitates stupid good looks but he brings more to the table than mere sauce. As capable of prat-falling as he is pouting, he seduces and sulks as the twisted codependency with his mother begins to bear fruit.
Moore delivers a feast of a performance as a woman who is undoubtedly terrible but terrible by circumstance. She is a shrewd, calculating master manipulator but her schemes regularly fail: her first visit to court ends in humiliation while her brand of feminism is entirely fuelled by self-interest. Just because she was in an unhappy, violent marriage doesn’t mean she has any qualms about consigning another woman to the same fate, when the husband in question is one of her sons.
There is more nuance than you might expect to be found in a series as raunchy as Mary & George. Like The Favourite and the prematurely cancelled The Great, this show’s biggest strength is its self-awareness. Such as when George gets to France and no-one is available to meet him because they’re all too busy having an orgy – two orgies to be precise (how French!). It’s less about titillating the viewer, more amusing us by flustering the rookie Englishman.
The ensemble cast is unwaveringly fantastic, especially Nicola Walker on tremendously catty form as the vindictive Lady Hatton, a more than worthy sparring partner for Moore. The script, from Killing Eve’s DC Moore, is packed with swearing and sarcasm while occasional slow-motion sequences magnify the ludicrous frivolity and grotesque glamour of life at court.
It loses a little momentum in the back end of the series when George gets stuck into diplomacy rather than debauchery, but a fiery climax with the king torn between the toxic twosome is a satisfying payoff.
Sky are clearly all in on Mary & George – it even has a “companion documentary” hosted by Alexa Chung – and there is a whiff of it all being a bit too calculated, but when it’s such riot of betrayal, backstabbing and bonking, it’s easily forgiven.
Too often TV critics (this one included) must bemoan a series for not living up to either its premise or the sum of its parts. Mary & George emphatically – uproariously – does both.
Mary & George is on Sky Atlantic tomorrow at 9pm and streaming on Now.