New PBS 'Victoria' Trailer Focuses on the Queen's Competing Roles
Billy & Hells
There are less than two months to go until the premiere of Victoria Season 2 on Masterpiece. This is great news in and of itself, obviously. But it also means that the floodgates of promotion are officially open. (This is a good thing, by the way.)
With only a few short weeks to go until Season 2 begins, prepare yourselves to see all kinds of trailers, promotional clips, behind-the-scenes photos and cast interviews start popping up all over. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and a real balm to the spirits of US fans who had to watch our UK friends get all the goodies a couple months ago.
PBS Masterpiece’s latest new trailer is entirely too short, but it really leans in to the sumptuous feeling of the show. The costumes are lovely, the settings are dramatic. Everything looks perfect. It also thoroughly underlines what will apparently be the big theme for Season 2, the tension between Victoria’s competing roles as wife, mother and monarch.
Given our current cultural moment, this seems like a particularly timely path for the popular period drama to go down.
Of course, the real Queen Victoria would have likely been no feminist, as we understand the term, despite her being status as a woman tasked with a powerful and demanding job that usually went to men. But the questions surrounding society's historical response to women in power are still very much valid today.
On the lighter side, I’m very pleased that thirty second spot features some actual footage of Rufus Sewell and his dreamy Lord Melbourne. He pops up seemingly solely to advise the young queen on her struggles to balance her crown and her family, which is nice to see if only because Victoria made a point last season to underline his role as someone who was always on her side. There’s also a blink and you’ll miss it shot of Dame Diana Rigg’s Ducchess of Bucccleuch. This version of the character is fairly historically inaccurate, given that the real Charlotte Montagu Douglas Scot was a much younger woman who became Victoria’s lifelong friend. But, it’s Diana Rigg, so I don’t think most of us are going to care.
Watch the latest clip for yourselves below:
Granted, we probably can’t expect Lord Melbourne to be in more than a couple of episodes in Season 2. No matter how much I wish the show would simply jettison actual history and give the man immortality and a massive role in the future of Victoria’s reign, that’s…sadly not very accurate. (And, for what it’s worth, Victoria is doing its best to stick to most of the actual beats of history.) So I'm trying to make the most out of the little we're likely to get.
Victoria returns to Masterpiece this January. Who else is (realllly) looking forward to Season 2?
