If you like your 18th century Russian history leavened with a heaping helping of black comedy, you’re already a fan of The Great, The Favourite scribe Tony McNamara’s satirical take on the life of Empress Catherine the Great. So, you’ll be pleased to know that season three of The Great is now out in New Zealand, streaming exclusively on NEON.
Adapted from McNamara’s 2008 stage play of the same name, The Great casts Elle Fanning as the titular Catherine, a young Austrian noblewoman married off to the boorish Peter III of Russia (a perfectly caddish Nicholas Hoult).
Forced to learn how to navigate the Byzantine Russian court on the fly, the rather enlightened Catherine takes to her new milieu with gusto. And as history buffs know, she goes on to become Russia’s longest reigning monarch, more or less single-handedly dragging the medieval country into the Age of Enlightenment.
But we’re not there yet! Catherine’s recent attempted murder of Peter has failed, with her lookalike lover Yemelyan Pugachev (also Hoult, naturally) dying instead. While the pair have finally declared their love for one another, attempted homicide tends to put a damper on romance, even if our Catherine had her reasons (Peter slept with and then accidentally killed her mother. Oops). And so, the stage is set for much more Machiavellian manoeuvring.
While The Great plays fast and loose with actual history, the show’s delicious vibe is perfectly on point, tying together themes of gender, power, love, lust, and ambition, and drenching them in deliciously dark satire. The opening title card cautions us that we’re watching “an almost entirely untrue story”, but it zeroes in on what Werner Herzog likes to call “ecstatic truth”—the ineffable essence of the thing, rather than the thing itself. And when the subject at hand is sexed-up successional skulduggery, you’re in for a good time.
