I suspect the major tagline for The Great, the (dare I say) great new limited series from Hulu about the rise of Russia’s Catherine the Great, will be some variation of “If you loved The Favourite, you’ll love The Great!” And, really, that statement isn’t wrong. But it sells The Great short. While there is certainly some shared DNA between the two stories, mostly in the tone and treatment of the royal court as highly sexed and wholly ridiculous, the story told in The Great is so completely different than the one in The Favourite that that is where all the comparisons end. Because The Great is the tale of a woman rising above the foreign courtier games to stage a coup against her husband and take control of one of the greatest nations in the world of the 18th century. Not exactly a simple task, but one The Great makes clear Catherine can handle.
It took me several episodes to really get into the series. There are a number of characters to wrap your head around (and, if I’m quite honest, I never learned most of the supporting players’ names – I just mentally referred to them by their role in the series: Catherine’s lover, the general, Catherine’s maid, the guy whose wife Peter is sleeping with), and it’s important to understand if they are on Team Catherine or Team Peter (the current king, played with a joyously infectious sense of privilege by Nicholas Hoult – you want to hate him for how entitled he acts, but Hoult makes it clear that he genuinely doesn’t understand why his actions might ever be interpreted as wrong; it’s a hell of a performance). But once you’ve gotten a lay of the land, The Great becomes a really fun binge.
The limited series makes it clear that it’s taking some liberties with history (one example: the Swedish king and queen introduced in an episode are purely made up for the series and don’t align with their historical counterparts of the time), but it gets the main strokes right: who Catherine was when she arrived in court, how quickly she managed to get a significant portion of the “right” people on her side (after a disastrous beginning) to stage a coup, and how the Russian nobles were fed up with Peter and hoping for a change. The show even finds a way to work in her decision to vaccinate herself from small pox, something that was revolutionary for the time – and something that likely helped save her life from the ravages of the disease. But nothing in the series would work without its central performance.
I’ll admit that I never really gave much thought to the rise of Catherine the Great. In fact, all I really knew I about her prior to this limited series was those rumors about her horse (which are woven into the series). But the combined power of stellar writing (mostly from Tony McNamara, who was also the writer behind The Favourite – more of that shared DNA between the two) and a truly nuanced performance from Elle Fanning as Catherine elevate both the story and the character above the absurd situations she often finds herself in. While the story takes place over a matter of six or so months, you get a full sense of Catherine’s journey from naive young woman to a ruler who understands that she must make sacrifices to achieve what’s best for her and Russia. However, both Fanning and the writing makes clear that Catherine isn’t a fully formed ruler by the end of the series. This is a woman only coming into her prime. She still has much to learn, but her journey to this starting point of her reign feels earned.
Now, lest you think this is some incredibly deep character study of Catherine, I want to assure you that The Great knows how to have fun – and how to take the piss out of royalty and courtiers. But, like I said earlier, this isn’t couched with the same sense of absurdist humor as The Favourite. The undercurrent of the series contains a serious look at how Catherine rose to power in spite of everything being stacked against her. It’s the tale of how a young woman grew into the woman who would change Russia. It just does it with vibrant colors and a lot of ridiculous situations threaded throughout. Watching The Great never felt like work. It might not be a binge you should attempt in a single sitting (ten hours isn’t easy to tackle in one go, pandemic or not), but I definitely recommend it.
The Great premieres on Hulu on Friday, May 15. All ten episodes of the limited series were provided for review.
-
Acting
-
Direction
-
Writing
