'Mary & George' is a Daring, Entertaining & Emotional Historical Drama
Mary & George, initially commissioned by AMC Networks in conjunction with Sky, but airing/streaming on Starz, isn’t your typical historical drama. The F-bombs and C-bombs fly like confetti, and there are bare bottoms galore. If you enjoyed films like The Favourite or shows like Starz’s The Serpent Queen, you’ll like Mary & George, but otherwise be warned. It boasts terrific performances by Julianne Moore (May December) as Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham, Nicholas Galitzine (Red, White & Royal Blue) as her son George, and Tony Curran (Mayflies, and a memorable Vincent Van Gogh in Doctor Who, Season 5) as James I.
The script by D.C. Moore (Killing Eve) is based on Benjamin Woolley's 2017 biography The King's Assassin: The Secret Plot to Murder James I, and the series is directed by Oliver Hermanus, Alex Winckler, and Florian Coss. The settings are beautiful and intimate, filmed in historic locations, and the costumes, designed by Annie Symons (The Hollow Crown), are spectacular–– brocades, linens, satins, and ruffs, those sexy dangly single earrings the men sport. It’s an era of peacocking display and also a time in which your income, social status, and even character were defined by what you wore.
Mary Villiers, widowed, ambitious, and broke, can only advance her fortunes by marriage, either hers or her children’s. Specifically, she has a plan for her beautiful second son George, by far the best of the crop. His older brother John Villiers (Tom Victor) shows signs of mental illness which Mary attributes to his father’s syphilis, and the others just seem to be very troublesome. For ready money, two weeks after her husband’s death, she proposes marriage (and lots of sex) to the rather jolly Sir Thomas Compton (Sean Gilder) in her first step on a ladder of danger, ambition, and intrigue.
