The Great is the anti-Bridgerton – and thank God for that

Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult return as Catherine the Great and Peter III in the third season of Hulu’s sweary, sexually explicit drama. Accuracy be damned, writes Louis Chilton – this is historical revisionism at its best

Lovers in arms: Nicholas Hoult and Elle Fanning in ‘The Great' (Hulu)

What good is historical accuracy anyway? The phrase is often treated like some secret ingredient, the be-all and end-all of a period drama’s artistic prowess. When a series such as The Crown dares to take liberties with historical accuracy, it is inflated into a sacrilege of parliamentary import. And then, along comes a programme like The Great. Set in 18th-century Russia, the series loosely – very, very loosely – follows the rise of Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) and her tumultuous marriage with Emperor Peter III (Nicholas Hoult). Even if it weren’t for the wildly comic plot twists depicting events that never happened, The Great could never be confused for historical document. It stares “historical accuracy” in the face and shrugs.

This historical irreverence manifests in big, unmissable ways. But the show’s penchant for anachronism also permeates smaller crevices of its script. Consider, for instance, the scene at the beginning of The Great’s third season, which premiered on Lionsgate+ last week. In it, Catherine and Peter tentatively reconcile after a failed assassination attempt at the end of last season (she had knifed a decoy wearing his coat). Discussing the ensuing conversation, the royal pair speak in a tone that oscillates between carefully phrased formality and coarse sexual bluntness. “Congratulations on [killing] the Sultan, by the way,” Hoult’s Peter says. “I’m f***ing hard just thinking about it.” Then, more eruditely: “You are as handy with a sharp knife as well as a sharp word.” More words are exchanged, in a similarly two-handed tenor – before the pair have passionate, slapdash sex. Then Catherine punches him in the head (“I may have some latent anger at times”). This scene is The Great in a nutshell. It’s a flurry of old-world eloquence, sexual frankness and slapstick violence, presented without segregation. The trick, which creator Tony McNamara manages to pull off with aplomb, is to make the show bawdy, and funny, and accessible, while steering clear of outright parody.

Down the years, there have been numerous attempts to modernise the staid, suffocating format of the costume drama. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-winning comedy-drama The Favourite tilled similar thematic soil, focusing on the messy love affair between Queen Anne and two of her underlings. Bridgerton is surely the best-known revisionist period drama of our times; produced for Netflix, the series, which follows the romantic dalliances of the upper crust in Regency-era London, is renowned for its ahistorical colourblind casting and copious sex scenes. The stuffy, corsets-and-curtseys stereotype of the genre is transformed into something else, something new and vaguely trashy.