Victoria arrives in the US four months after its debut on ITV. How does it hold up to the Downton Abbey legacy, and competition like The Crown?
At the beginning of this decade there was a seismic shift in television that would alter the course what is commonly referred to as “Peak TV.” The one most people think of is the debut of Game of Thrones, which combined the slow build of Mad Men with fantasy, politics, lavish visuals and hardcore sex and violence. But only a few months before, a second show had hit the airwaves, over on PBS. Downton Abbey, which would go on to become the most popular show ever aired on public television, had an inauspicious start in January of 2011, aired as a four part miniseries in the dead of winter.
"Victoria: “She doesn’t have a name. She’s a hundred and twenty-three, my mother gave her to me on my eleventh birthday.”"
While most mainstream cable channels have been chasing the Game of Thrones model since it arrived, airing things from gory violent massacres to high fantasy vistas, BBC, ITV and Netflix have been looking for their next Downton. The BBC rebooted Poldark, the most popular show to ever air on public television, previous to Downton. Netflix sextupled down on the ultra ambitious The Crown, a period piece set just after the time of Downton, that one upped it by being about the royal family proper instead of just a middling earl. Meanwhile ITV took the same approach as Netflix but in the other direction. Instead of heading forward in time to a more familiar world, they went backwards, back to a time when the sun never set on the British Empire, and the glory years of the Empire were at hand.
Image via ITV
But what is most striking, especially having sat through Claire Foy’s performance of the next female monarch to follow Victoria, is how much the character is a blank slate in her own story. When we meet Victoria, she has just learned she has become Queen, she’s still carrying about a dolly and according to everyone around her, she’s not ready, she’s not fit and she’s not going to be ready or fit any time soon. The problem is that there is nothing about Jenna Coleman’s performance that suggests she has much thought or opinions on the matter. It would be lovely to see Victoria show some emotions about her father’s death, or contemplate her readiness or her fitness for the throne. Instead it’s everyone else who tells us what we’re supposed to think of the young Queen.
"Brodie: “There’s over a thousand candles a week in this corridor alone. Don’t suppose there’s an extra shilling in it for me? You know, for running them down to the pickers.”"
Those people who are telling us all about our Queen aren’t just the ones upstairs either. In the one place the show ones up on The Crown, Poldark and all the rest is the choice to once again have an “upstairs/downstairs” element to the show. Though some of the downstairs stories are off —the maid with the shady past for instance, feels vaguely unbelievable — the scheming head steward, Penge and lady’s maid Mrs. Jenkins make for quite a breath of fresh air after the pious goody-two-shoes behavior of Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes. Selling slightly used candles, and Victoria’s gently used gloves, for extra cash seems far more believable, though perhaps Victoria’s discovery and indulgence of the latter not quite so much.
Image via PBS
When the Queen is not blank-slating for the opinions of everyone around her, there’s not much…well, “there” there, as it were. Mostly she seems preoccupied with her mother’s poor life choices, her ladies in waiting, whom she seems to have mistaken for friends (a fact that no one actually takes the time to show is an extremely foolish notion) and bizarrely petty behaviors. Perhaps this is the point—the showing of how young and flighty this eighteen year old was when she ascended the throne. One might assume there are serious daddy issues at play, especially with her emotionally attaching herself to the much older Lord Melbourne, but the show doesn’t seem interested in poking that much, in favor of casting the sinfully-handsome-in-period-clothing Rufus Sewell as the Prime Minister, suggesting that Victoria’s fancying him was tragically romantic instead.
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One useful thing that the smashing together of the opening episodes does provide is a faster path to the arrival of Prince Albert, who (spoiler alert) Victoria will eventually marry. Next week, in fact, the machinations will begin that will cause them to meet, and as history tells us, fall madly in love with him. Personally, that’s a wedding I can’t wait to see staged.