I loved Showtime’s The Tudors. When it debuted I didn’t have Showtime (indeed, I never had Showtime during the run of the series), and when I saw the first season box set at Wal-Mart one evening I bought it on a whim and blitzed through the first season in a weekend. Utterly ahistorical, but slickly made, gorgeous looking, enjoyably performed, and dramatically gripping.
Over the years since there have been a number of series that I’ve described as “The Tudors with King Arthur” (Camelot), “The Tudors in the Vatican” (The Borgias), and “The Tudors in a fantasy world” (Game of Thrones). This week the CW debuted a series that, when I heard about it over the summer, I said, “Oh, it’s The Tudors with Mary Queen of Scots” — Reign.
I watched the first episode on Thursday. The first few minutes — Mary living in a convent in France for her protection, an assassination attempt on her life, Nostradamus predicting that Mary will come to court, horses riding hard down dusty roads — hit my Tudors buttons. Ahistorical as all get out — Mary lived in the French court from the time she was five, no conventing for her — but I was fine with it.
And then as the French court awaited the arrival of Mary it turned into an unholy mess.
Her betrothed, Francis the French dauphin, was far too healthy and tall to be anything like his historical self. But that didn’t bother me; The Tudors did any number of things like this, changing an historical character to make a better dramatic character.
No, what irked me was the arrival of Mary’s four handmaidens from Scotland because I felt like I’d suddenly entered an entirely different series about four privileged and wealthy women out to make their mark on the world, find boyfriends, and live life like it’s a party. Followed minutes later where the handmaidens and Mary try on dresses and put on make-up to an alt-rock soundtrack.
The tonal shifts between Tudors-esque costume drama and CW-esque teen soap would give an MPD sufferer whiplash.
I expected something about as historically accurate as The Tudors, which is to say “Not historically accurate at all.” And for the half of the episode that played like a PG-13 Tudors, it generally worked and had potential. It wouldn’t be a Tudors-esque series without mysteries (who is the hooded women in the castle who is trying to protect Mary?) and political machinations (what are Nostradamus and Catherine de Medici doing?), and the seeds for season-long arcs are planted.
But then you have the other half of the episode. Boy-crazy handmaidens? A plucky heroine who defies the conventions of the times to assert her independence? A broody and indecisive male lead? An alt-rock soundtrack that has nothing to do with the era and everything to do with pushing emotional buttons? In no sane world do those twenty minutes belong in the same program as the machinations of Catherine de Medici.
The last night, either out of boredom or madness, I rewatched the pilot. It didn’t irk me as much as it had on Thursday night, probably because I knew what to expect with the wild tonal shifts from costume drama to teen soap, sometimes in the same scene. Mind you, I’m still not saying that it’s good. It’s still undoubtedly aneurysm-causing for the historically sensitive among us. I don’t even want to imagine what my old history professor at Richmond, John Rilling, would think of Reign.
I’d have a difficult time recommending the series as it exists after one episode. The production values are good. For a CW budget, it looked sumptuous, though the limitations of the CW budget did show through with limited sets and a curiously empty castle. But the storytelling was all over the map. I can imagine the elevator pitch for Reign — “A Tudors-esque historical drama for the CW audience” — and that’s certainly what the first episode delivers. The half that had me going “Whiskey tango foxtrot?!?” hit that demographic square on the head, while the other half that entertained me no doubt baffled the CW demo. If the producers can sort out the storytelling, perhaps by steering Reign in a Tudors direction and living up to its potential, it could turn out to be something worthwhile.
Idly, I found myself wondering if there were a multiyear plan for the series. I went looking for my copy of Antonia Fraser’s biography of Mary Queen of Scots and, unable to find it (I wonder if I got rid of it when I moved, since I culled my library by about a third), I turned to Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization, specifically The Age of Reason Begins, to check some dates. Given where the series starts, Mary and Francis will wed in a year, King Henry will die in two years, and Francis will die in three. There you have it, the season finales for the the next three years.
A fourth season, set in Scotland, would be fascinating. Mary would be nineteen, widowed, living in a country she hasn’t see since she was five, thinking of herself as French and not Scottish, having to deal with John Knox and the Scottish Reformation, and caught up in the various dynastic plots on both sides of the English border.
Somehow, though, I don’t think Reign will get that far.