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it weren’t for the wildly comic plot twists depicting events that never happened, The Great could never be confused for historical document.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.

But for all its raunch and prurience, Bridgerton is, in many ways, traditional in its outlook. It is a romance in every sense of the word: dewy-eyed about both its characters’ sweeping love affairs and about the opulent, lavishly dressed world they inhabit. Its approach to sex, and language, reflects this. The Great, on the other hand, uses sex and obscenity to shock and discombobulate. Sudden, crude anachronisms send scenes rushing headlong into our present day, their relevance and power readily apparent. The Great is not so interested in depicting the past as it is in allegorising our present – or perhaps creating some third thing, an alternative imagined universe where people dress like royalty but curse like porn stars. The world of The Great is one of contradiction; this is put onscreen and we are invited to simply deal with it. Tonally, the series is many things, but romantic is not one of them.

The most brilliant and enduring of The Great’s linguistic forebears is David Milch’s HBO western Deadwood (2004 to 2006). Exploring the end of the Old West, the period series adopted a language rife with anachronism in both directions – ornate, pseudo-Shakespearean phrases peppered with filthy modern swear words (“c***sucker” being a particular go-to). The effect was singular, making Deadwood’s dusty frontier town seem both ages old and brutal in a recognisably modern way. The Great doesn’t reach for Deadwood’s iambic elegance, but it shares that series’ willingness to embrace anachronism for the purposes of storytelling.

Whether or not The Great works for you will probably boil down to a sense of humour; if you don’t find the show’s crass outbursts amusing, they risk coming across as actively obnoxious. But maybe the obnoxiousness is the point. It is easy to romanticise the past, to believe that people were somehow better, more dignified, in the age of gowns and formalities. The Great forces us to see these characters as living, breathing, swearing, fornicating beings. This might not be exactly who they were. But it’s not exactly who they weren’t either.

‘The Great’ is available to stream now on Lionsgate+ in the UK