- Network: Prime Video
- Series Premiere Date: Sep 19, 2024
Critic Reviews
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Anyone who watches the full interview could rightly wonder, “How could you be so stupid to sit for an interview like this and say things like that?” “Royal” does a thorough, energetic, juicy-but-serious job of answering. And yet, the show can’t escape its own admission that there are much bigger questions one could ask about rape, misogyny, money, secrecy and power. Maitlis has a pat monologue about the injustice of it all, but the call is coming from inside the mini-series.
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Like Maitlis, A Very Royal Scandal handles itself with comportment and class, but as a drama, it is too frictionless for its own good.
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As entertainment, character study and thematic exploration, A Very Royal Scandal largely works. However, the former is somewhat diminished, a little unfairly, by this show being second to the punch. To its benefit, it doesn't reach for easy answers, even if the lack of answers may be frustrating.
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Most absent from the drama is a proper discussion about, firstly, the impact of the allegations on the victim, Giuffre, and, secondly, the myriad other victims of Epstein’s abuse. Only in the third episode does it transition from journalistic cat and mouse to an introspection on one of the most shocking abuses of power in modern history.
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Maitlis is portrayed as a somewhat scatterbrained albeit serious journalist, constantly running late and misplacing shoes as she juggles work and family, while Andrew comes across as boorish, offensive, and woefully disconnected from the real world. Among Sheen’s several excellent impersonations of real-life figures in both television and film, his interpretation of Prince Andrew as a petulant uncle feels phoned-in and thinly sketched. .... It’s only in the last of the three episodes that the series touches on anything that could be described as revelatory.
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The original interview was a television spectacle but its impact in the grand scheme of things was limited. For A Very Royal Scandal to be more than a flimsy footnote, it needed to tell us more than what we already knew.
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This is the second recreation of the 2019 encounter that proved so disastrous for the Duke of York, and it definitely feels like one too many. .... She [Emily Maitlis] is played by Ruth Wilson, who is less fun in the role than Scoop’s Gillian Anderson.