The Last Czars

[osprey_archer]

I started watching Netflix’s The Last Czars because I’m a sucker for royalty and Russia, and the first episode was going fairly well in a cut-rate episode of the The Crown kind of way -

When all of a sudden the show stops dead and there’s a talking head academic type explaining something or other about the Romanovs, as if this were a documentary and not a drama at all.

In fact, the show is some unholy hybrid of the two. The dramatized scenes are much longer than you’d normally get in a documentary (and include Nicky and Alix fucking on a bearskin rug in Nicky’s opulent office while praising God in the hopes that this will help them conceive a son, I’ll take “things I never wanted to see” for ten thousand, Alex), but juuuuust when you’re relaxing into the show and getting into the story, all of a sudden Simon Sebag Montefiore is on screen explaining to you about Khlysti, an orgiastic Russian Orthodox sect with whom Rasputin had ties.

This is particularly maddening because it seems so unnecessary. They don’t need talking heads, and a voiceover, and other characters within the storyline (usually Nicky’s brother, who seems to be the only sensible Romanov) explaining “This latest mistake will haunt your reign, Nicky!” to handhold viewers in what is ultimately a quite simple storyline: “Tsar Nicholas II makes a series of mistakes that lead to his downfall.”

...However, it’s been so long since there’s been a new season of The Crown that I’ve gone into royalty-withdrawal, so I’m still watching. (Maybe I should try to forestall this in the future by watching one of the many - many! - productions about Victoria.) It’s only six episodes long, and I’m already halfway through, and I want to know if they are in fact going to have M. Gilliard decide that this poor girl in a madhouse in Berlin is Anastasia after all.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

In fact, the show is some unholy hybrid of the two.

Oh dear! Although whether or not you should watch Victoria depends on how you feel about historical accuracy to sugar coating ratio. It's very pretty, well cast and well made, though. It just tends to casually lop thousands off the casualty statistics of major events because, idk, that would be depressing and might make Victoria look bad for a moment or two?

(I just watch ancient TV instead which moves at the pace of porridge, but at least while still fiction and therefore never 100% reliable on the facts, is remarkably unafraid of historical accuracy and hats, which makes a nice change to the modern stuff, which seems to be weirdly terrified of both. If you are ever up for such creaky fare, I can rec a whole list! Although one or two of them edge on docudrama, so that goes way back, but at least 70s BBC style that was just a discreet voiceover from someone like Michael Hordern with major battles they couldn't attempt to stage in studio being portrayed via sound effects and contemporary illustrations shot dramatically.)

[osprey_archer]

I feel like if you don't make Victoria look bad occasionally, what even is the point? She was clearly a complicated person with some bad qualities.

I guess The Crown isn't exactly rushing to making Queen Elizabeth II look bad either, but on the other hand she's currently the reigning monarch, while Victoria has been dead for a hundred odd years. I feel like that should give them more leeway.

[thisbluespirit]

She's allowed to behave badly in her personal life, but overall she is an amazing person and stuff in Victorian England is way better than you would expect even though they dutifully remind us of the Poor and the Class System when they feel like it (it's as embarrassing as when Downton did it, but at least they were mostly all made up). The thing is, S1 was Victoria ascends the throne as a sort of candyfloss feminist fairy tale which does kind of work, but the moment they finished with an announcement that there would be a S2, I went OH NO, and have been doing so ever since, while still watching because it is so pretty and well-made and candyflossy.

But last time they did a terrible 2 parter on the Chartists and then skipped the 1848-9 Cholera epidemic (which meant that 1 of Victoria's staff died in a freak incident with the Broad Street Pump from the 1855 cholera epidemic), most of the PMs are sexier than in real life (entertaining, though) and following his success at the 1851 Great Exhibition, Albert has collapsed and this stage I have no idea whether this is a random cliffhanger or they've just killed off Albert 10 years early.

It is very pretty and Jenna Coleman is brilliant, though. But be prepared for sort of clueless social justice imposed on a candyfloss Victorian London plus any given massacre or epidemics having 1000s more survive than in rl. They just want to make it a Woman Succeeding Against the Men! And history is just really awkward about that kind of thing, really.