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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
8
Mixed:
10
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The IndependentJan 3, 2020
Season 1 Review:
It helps to have Clarke, Roxburgh and Kinnear, three of the best going, around her, broad-shouldered men in this women’s world. If the dialogue is occasionally over-expository, that’s understandable, and on the whole the starry team makes cantering over all this historical turf look surprisingly intimate. Catherine’s not quite great, yet, but she’s very good.
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Oct 29, 2019
Season 1 Review:
There’s something hot, heady, and transporting about this fantasy of shared rule—a world full of treasures ready for the taking, a woman in charge, and a man who adores her without hesitation. ... Catherine the Great reframes her desire as part of her glory—and revels in that glory, without asking too many awkward questions
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Oct 21, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Mirren is the reason to watch, and reason enough. It’s no knock against the rest of the cast or the production designer or costumers or digital matte painters, who have all acquitted themselves bravely, even brilliantly, to say that there is no other particularly compelling reason to spend four hours in this slice of 18th century history.
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Oct 23, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Having Helen Mirren fabulously bring this overlooked monarch to life at a moment when women’s fitness to lead is, unbelievably, still being questioned makes this four-hour romp worthwhile. But I’m struck by two things. Catherine the Great looks and feels like something HBO could have done 15 years ago, and indeed did do 15 years ago with this same team.
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IndieWireOct 11, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Nothing is subtle about it: not the acting, not the directing by Philip Martin, not the production design, not the costumes. It’s full-tilt scenery-chewing glamour in every frame of every scene. ... And, for the most part, it works. Mirren is in full DAME HELEN MIRREN mode, regal and saucy and steely by turn.
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Oct 21, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Mirren is great here. ... Catherine the Great falls into every trap that awaits a biographical miniseries cramming decades of the complex life of a ruler into a handful of hours. ... The best parts of the show are about the ways that her power enriches her love, and vice versa.
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Oct 11, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Catherine’s lack of change, along with her consistent ability to outmaneuver her political opponents, robs the series of momentum despite the astonishing range of Mirren and Clarke’s performances. No threat to Catherine’s reign is ever serious, no geopolitical conflict ever out of her or Potemkin’s control. Conspiracies and wars serve merely to punctuate the show’s development of the romance at its core. That love story, however, doesn’t evolve much either.
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Oct 21, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Catherine The Great’s storytelling never manages to equal the grandeur of its richly detailed set design; as the series unfolds, those extravagant visuals become more and more like façades from the mythical Potemkin villages. ... Mirren and Clarke deliver compelling performances as a clever, iron-willed queen and a soldier turned high-ranking statesman, respectively.
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Oct 21, 2019
Oct 21, 2019
Season 1 Review:
In effect, the miniseries trims the tawdry and scurrilous details from the monarchy's biography and replaces them with a much more conventional story of a woman whose greatest ideas are supplied by or on behalf of a compelling man. On her own behalf, Catherine mostly fights a repetitive battle to maintain control,
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Oct 18, 2019
Season 1 Review:
“Catherine the Great” is a handsome and competent production that luxuriates in every regal Russian set it gets (albeit with an occasionally distracting green screen for more elaborate outdoor scenes). Mirren is as good as aforementioned, and Gina McKee especially pops as the Countess Praskovya Bruce. ... And yet: stepping back from the series’ four episodes reveals a disappointing lack of ambition in portraying such a titanic force’s final days.
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Oct 17, 2019TV Guide MagazineOct 14, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Opulent if oddly constricted. ... [Mirren is] great, even when trapped in a romance novel. [14-27 Oct 2019, p.11]
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