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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
18
Mixed:
7
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The GuardianMar 18, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The stakes increase with every episode as the family climbs higher up the rungs of the social and court ladder and the whole thing remains tremendous. Propulsive but grounded. Plotty but never messy. Exuberant and sumptuous without becoming bananas (The Tudors, I love you, but come on). And that rarest treat: bitingly witty, just when it needs to be.
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ColliderMar 27, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Mary & George is what happens when a show is firing on all cylinders, as it features a bevy of talented performers with great chemistry delivering fantastically written material. Not only that, but it’s delivered in a beautifully crafted package with remarkable aesthetics and an equally extraordinary soundtrack to boot. This show — like King James I — rules hard.
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The TimesSep 11, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Since the 2018 film The Favourite, followed by TV’s The Great, a contemporary energy has entered the genre — one charged with a ton of colourful swearing, moments of off-centre humour and romping a go-go, the more sexually fluid the better. Mary & George has all this in abundance. A touch affected, maybe, but certainly fun.
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Apr 5, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Darkly comic and lushly erotic, both boldly anachronistic and surprisingly true to history, “Mary & George” takes the better part of its duration for the viewer to internalize its offbeat, unpredictable rhythms. By then, what could be a standard story about the overlap of sex and ambition has wormed its way deep under our skin.
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Mar 27, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Mary & George takes bold swings, with regard to its approach to the period’s details and to its depiction of history. These swings are wild enough that it could off-put purists of the genre, but I was delighted. Mary & George is the type of show pushing the period drama genre where it needs to go in the future: to a vision of the past that shows us how similar it really was to our present.
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Apr 5, 2024The Mercury NewsApr 4, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Never staid and often kinky, “Mary & George” stumbles halfway through but remains chew-up-the-scenery entertainment, a spicy affair that gets more outlandish and wicked with each episode. It helps that Moore and Galitzine are so good at forming this chess-like alliance and that a trio of top-notch directors — Oliver Hermanus, Alex Winckler and Florian Cossen — never let the high drama topple over into outright camp.
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Apr 3, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Mostly, though, there’s Julianne Moore. What a performance! Mary is arguably the most vicious and intimidating figure in the entire, sprawling story, yet Moore never shies away from showing us how Mary is often clueless and puts herself in humiliating situations — only to get back on her feet, dust herself off and get back in the game, more tenacious and dangerous than ever.
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Apr 1, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Unlike Galitzine, who struggles with the various notes George calls him to play, Moore is truly dialed into the woman Mary was. .... [Julianne Moore] more than holds her own, finding a chilling coarseness run through her portrayal of Mary Villiers. On the other end of the spectrum is Tony Curran. The Scottish actor brings a welcome incandescent warmth to the Scottish-turned-English King.
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The PlaylistMar 29, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Even if it might be tricky to remember when George fell ill with the pox or any individual scene of the young man sleeping his way to the top of the ladder, there’s still enough to consider continuing the journey into the remainder of the season; it’s a testament to all involved and their ability to make a compelling watch out of something centuries in the past draped with a peculiar contemporary feel. It’s imperfect, and yet somehow works.
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Mar 27, 2024
Season 1 Review:
It’s more difficult than it should be to figure out how it wants us to understand Mary’s story, let alone her place among the pantheon of powerful women that history has done dirty. And as fun as Mary & George is, it’s hard not to wonder what the version of this show that let us really get to know her might have looked like.
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RogerEbert.comApr 5, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Galitzine is doing what he’s known for: playing an omnisexual noble whose beauty determines his path. Or at least that’s where we start. .... In the season’s back half, its talented actors and specific setting reveal something dark but essential about the human condition, beauty, and bravado.
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TV Guide MagazineApr 23, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Mary & George is lurid fun, up to a point, as a kitschy hybrid of historical drama and R-rated primetime soap. [22 Apr - 12 May 2024, p.5]
The IndependentMar 18, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The sexual politics (and sexual politicking) of Mary & George will come to define the show for most viewers, but underneath the heaving buttocks, there’s an interesting depiction of life at the advent of modernity. It’s a shame, then, that in trying to be so modern, the show forgets to take a punt on having an identity of its own. Risqué, perhaps, but risky? Not so much.
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Apr 2, 2024
Season 1 Review:
But just as George does, the series eventually becomes too grandiose in its ambitions. Midway through, Mary & George eschews the carnal intrigue and begins plodding through Jacobean history, darkening itself into a moody recitation of the downfall of Walter Raleigh and other events leading to George’s end.
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