Marie Antoinette, season two

This picks up from where season one left off with an immediate change of emphasis. While the lower classes were almost entirely absent in the first run, they now make their presence felt - albeit only via their interactions with the central characters, the royal family of France in the 1880s.

Queen Marie Antoinette is no longer portrayed as sympathetically as before, with her arrogance coming to the fore as her dominant character trait. And her repeated infidelity to the king is contrasted against his refusal to take a mistress even when it is something that is virtually expected of him by the society of the day.

King Louis xvi (played by Louis Cunningham, giving a stronger performance than the first season allowed him) is presented in such a way that even the most hard-hearted abolitionist will struggle to dislike him as an individual - one of the main plotlines is the terminal illness and death of their eldest son, the Dauphin, and how this affects Louis on an emotional level.

Where he loses our sympathies is in his role as king, since he is a terrible autocrat who makes mistaik after mistaik (the writing cleverly shows us that he makes his decisions with the best of intentions before showing how they backfire upon him) with the goal of retaining as much power to himself and "the crown" as possible. Each time he stubbornly resists pressure to make concessions to his political enemies, the situation then gets worse and he ends up having to concede even more than he would have if he had compromised to begin with.

The king's main opponents are his younger brother (confusingly also named Louis, but helpfully known as "Provence" due to his title), who conspires with the nobles to have the king declared incapable so that he can seize power as regent, and their cousin, the Duke of Orleans, who uses his vast fortune to print propaganda and stage plays to turn the people against the king while at the same time making himself seem like the peoples' friend. They both make progress with these plans, but while neither of them totally succeed in their objectives they do manage to erode support for the royal family in general - not something they want to happen if they are to one day be king themselves.

Meanwhile, the queen becomes involved in a scandal not of her own making but which her reputation (which is in a large part her own fault) makes the people believe is due to her. This is the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, a real historic event which I am most familiar with due to the lesser-known Alexandre Dumas novel The Queen's Necklace, which plays out over the first six episodes of the season, and where the aftermath is felt in the last two instalments.

As part of a plan to steal the world's most valuable diamond necklace, a trio of con artists forge letters which pretend to be from the queen to Cardinal Rohan* who is out of favour at the court but desperate to get back into good graces with the royal family. They trick the cardinal into acting as an intermediary buying the necklace on the queen's behalf, and then handing it over to her "special guard" who is really one of their number. The con is then uncovered when the jeweller wants paid and the queen denies any knowledge of it.

We follow the prime mover of the conspiracy, Jeanne la Motte de Valois (played by Freya Mavor, a magnetic presence who at times becomes as much the central character of the series as the title character) as she executes every part of the plan, and the addition of this storyline lets this season equal or even exceed the brilliance of the first, due to the way it moves in parallel with the court intrigues and then at times influences it, even in ways Jeanne has not intended and - in many cases - does not even know about.

Dumas's novel makes the Italian occultist Count Cagliostro the mastermind behind the affair, but this series sticks closer to real history (at the same time as giving a female character more agency) by depicting him as a con artist who was active in Paris at the time, and known to both Jeanne and Cardinal Rohan, but who was innocent of any involvement in the plot.

The decision to make the series protagonists act like 21st century people who find themselves living in the past, which was present in the first season, is if anything even more obviously the case here, with multiple instances of anachronistic modern turns of phrase being used. Also, the French financial crisis caused by the massive cost of their war with Britain is described using modern terms that viewers can be expected to be familiar with from real-world events of the last 20 years. The attempts by the king and his "Financial Controller" to reduce the deficit can also be compared and contrasted to 2010s austerity policies or Liz Truss panicking the markets, which gives us a shortpaw way of comprehending why they fail so disastrously.

The season concludes as the French Revolution begins in 1889, with news of the storming of the Bastille prison reaching the court at Versailles. What comes next could be left as an exercise for the viewer, so it will be interesting to see if there is a third (and presumably final) season covering the events of the revolution up to the deaths of the king and queen. There's surely plenty of material from history to fill another eight episodes, not least the royal family's ill-fated attempt to escape from France. With the Duke of Orelans being such a major character in the first two seasons, a subplot about his futile attempts to manipulate the revolution to his benefit could be just as interesting as the fates of Louis and Marie Antoinette.

Both seasons are currently available to watch on the BBC iPlayer.

* Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?

Marie Antoinette, season one

I was only put onto this when its second season began showing on the BBC. If historical accuracy is what you're after then this series is not for you, but I get the strong impression that it is not trying to be - there are enough details there as if to say 'we could have been more accurate if we had wanted to.'

Set almost entirely among the highest echelons of the French and Austrian courts of the late 18th century, the characters nevertheless speak and interact in a very modern way, with even the supposed extreme formality of the French court at Versailles seeming laughably informal to those of us who have watched, say, Wolf (...pause for 20 seconds while Mark Rylance takes off and then puts back on his hat...) Hall.

The main character throughout is Marie Antoinette (hence the title, but I suppose they couldn't exactly call it Versailles since there was a different series with that name made between 2015 and 2018), played by Emilia Schüle - a sort of female Matt Smith, I could imagine her playing the Doctor much more easily than I could imagine someone like, say, Billie Piper in the part. The series takes us from her marriage to the heir to the throne of France, the future king Louis xvi who famously lost his head, to the birth of their first son which made the marriage secure.

Louis here is an interesting character because he is so obviously being written and played as what we would now recognise as neurodivergent, what with his extreme social awkwardness. This is possibly the main reason why I cannot decide if the modernisation of the characters is something forced upon the makers of the series as a way of making it accessible (more than just the usual things we take for granted in historical dramas, such as the way they all speak 21st century English instead of 18th century French), or if this was a purposeful stylistic choice to make the main protagonists seem like 21st century people forced to live in the past.

The series tries its hardest to make us feel sympathy for Louis and Marie Antoinette by carefully never showing us how the common people of France lived at that time showing us how they were trapped in their roles as heir to the throne, close to power but  essentially powerless, their everyday actions dictated to them by court ritual and etiquette, and surounded by the rest of the French royal family, most of whom hated them.

At the beginning of the series the king of France is Louis xv, magnificently (and scene-stealingly) played by James "Mark Antony" Purefoy (more like Purrfoy) as an old letch. His mistress, Madame du Barry, is the main antagonist to Marie Antoinette for the first half of the season, who is eventually defeated by means of the old king dying. The second half of the series then shifts to being about Louis and Marie Antoinette adapting to their new roles as king and queen.

Louis now has power but his wife still has almost none, unless and until she can give birth to a male heir (the French never allowed women to be monarchs so a daughter wasn't good enough), and she remains surrounded by enemies since anyone at the court who wants to end the French alliance with Austria wants to get rid of the king's Austrian wife. Marie Antoinette doesn't do herself any favours here since her behaviour, rebelling against the constraints placed upon her and spending lavishly on her favourites, gives her enemies plenty of ammunition to use against her. And foreshadows her eventual fate.

Filming at the actual palace of Versailles makes the series look fantastic, so the authentic appearance of the locations (and interior sets and costumes, to be fair, although this is par for the course when it comes to costume dramas) contrasts with the purposefully anachronistic characters inhabiting them to create a distictive take on the story of the period.

At the time of writing this I haven't watched the second season yet (it is all up on the BBC iPlayer already, though it won't finish being broadcast until near the end of June) so I don't know how far that will take us towards the revolution. It will be interesting to see how long the series can maintain viewer sympathy in Marie Antoinette, or if it even tries to.