The Royals

With The Royals, E! has a juicy soap opera that’s addictive, naughty and just the right amount of silly.

Once you commit yourself to the trashy abandon of The Royals, the one critique of the show might be that the abandon isn’t reckless or campy enough.

If anything, you'll wish The Royals were trashier. [13 Mar 2015, p.67]

The Royals wants to shock but can’t, since the world it describes is something we know all too well from tabloid headlines about the real British royals. These characters are bored by their own jaded lives--and so are we.

The Royals is pretty much the entertainingly trashy prime-time soap you’d expect.

The Royals doesn’t pretend to be much more than good fun, and it delivers that.

A silly but potentially addictive soap.

The Royals is entertaining but disappointingly toothless.

The trash meter soars when [Elizabeth Hurley's] on-screen, then sags when she's off. And there's just too much sag here.

The Royals might have been more promising if it had been a little more ebullient and a lot more outrageous. There’s something too ordinary about it. We want to be bloody gobsmacked, mate.

It should be a hoot, but it actually gets old, and dull, very quickly.

Camp requires courage, and The Royals has none.

The hourlong drama often plays like an extended MTV music video interspersed with dialogue.

Royals is absent any thrill, any of that ticklish delight that makes shows like this pop.

A wan, chintzy soap that can’t compete with reality–either Britain’s or E!’s.

The Royals is a trashy soap opera that’s not bad enough to be funny and is best when it wallows in melodrama.

Mostly, though, the fluctuations in tone are jarring, from wacky and screwball to earnest and warmhearted at the drop of a tiara. And while subsequent episodes keep spinning out new conflicts and crises, there’s going to have to be some generous grading on a curve to make this qualify as the guilty pleasure it’s clearly intended to become.