Made the same year as the Marie Antoinette TV series that I watched last year, this tells the story of a different Queen of France but in a quite similar style - it's another of those historical dramas that uses modern language (including copious swearing) and frequent graphic violence, sex scenes and nudity to keep a casual audience interested. The modern (21st century) incarnation of this sort of TV show can be traced to The Tudors, which began in 2007, but really this kind of tits-out edutainment goes back at least as far as I Claudius in the 1970s.
Speaking of Claudius, this is perhaps the closest that I have seen any 21st century series come to approximating the feel of that show, and this I put down to the choice of central character and the actress to play her - the titular Serpent Queen is Catherine de' Medici (Queen of France from 1547 to 1559, then Queen Mother of France until 1589), played by Samantha "Cracker" Morton. Don't get me wrong, Catherine is no Livia, because nobody is, and Morton isn't Siân Phillips neither, but that's an unfairly high bar to set anyone. Nevertheless, Catherine has that Liviaesque quality where she does terrible things to close members of her family, but we as viewers get to see why she acts the way she does, and can even sympathise with her up to a point.
Also like Claudius, the series - at least this first season, since I have not yet watched the second - uses the conceit of a central narrator telling their story in flashback, so the idea of the unreliable narrator telling a biased version of events from their point of view is baked into the show from the start. This also includes moments where the flashback-version of the narrator's character will turn to the camera, House of Cards-style, and address the audience directly.
Where this varies from the usual form of this trope is that the narrator changes to a second and then third character - in the first six (of eight) episodes, Catherine tells her life story to her new maid Rahima, then in episode seven Rahima hears events told from the point of view of Catherine's recently widowed daughter-in-law Mary, the Queen of Scotland. In the final episode the flashbacks catch up with the 'present' of the story as Rahima joins the dots and tells Catherine what must have happened for events to have gone from A to B. This is Rahima attempting to demonstrate her intelligence to impress Catherine, so it represents one of the best examples I have seen of exposition where one character tells another something they already know, really in order to inform the viewer at home.
Mary Queen of Scots is an interesting historical figure to feature so heavily in this show - she is essentially the main antagonist for the last two episodes - because this gives us a period of her life that is rarely depicted. Most dramas I know of about her - even most documentaries - concentrate on her later life, either after her return to Scotland or even after her flight to and captivity in England. Here Mary's religious fanaticism is foregrounded, and her intolerance for the large population of Protestants in France threatens the stability that Catherine seeks to maintain, and pushes the country to the brink of civil war.
This is a series in which each episode improves on the one before. The first three tell the story of Catherine's arranged marriage to a son of the French King, and the well-worn tale of her precarious political situation until she can give her husband a son and heir. Anyone who has seen a drama about Henry VIII of England has seen this story told multiple times - even if they have only watched one version. For me the main attraction of these episodes was spotting the guest actors, most notably Charles "Golden Child" Dance as Catherine's uncle Pope Clement VII, and Colm "Chief O'Brien" Meaney is Catherine's father-in-law King Francis I.
With a plot so keenly concerned about whether the main character conceives a child or not, it is unsurprising that there is rather a lot of sex in these early episodes. I think the first gratuitous sex scene appears six minutes into the first episode. But the sex is not portrayed as glamorous - The Tudors this is not - and only titillating to those with very specialised interests, which I do not intend to detail here. The violence we see is also, in my opinion, unnecessarily graphic (and might have been more effectively conveyed if it had been more subtly hinted at instead of shown), including an execution by four horses.
Episode three ends with Catherine pregnant and her husband now the heir to the French throne (after the death of his older brother), after which there is a time-skip that ages up the main characters (so that from episode four onwards Morton plays both 'present-day' Catherine and flashback Catherine) and allows the introduction of some new ones. Notable guest actors for the second half of the season include Rupert Everett as the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Nicholas "Nathan Barley" Burns as Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre and high up in the line of succession for the French throne as well. A significant plot point is how Antoine and his Bourbon family are biscuits Protestants, bringing them into conflict with the staunch Catholic de Guise family, of which Queen Mary is one.
The middle of the series sees Catherine's husband Henry become King Henry II, after which it mainly concerns Catherine's rivalry with her husband's mistress Diane de Poitiers. Henry values Catherine for her intellect and political skills, but Diane is the one he likes to sleep with. Catherine does not mind that so much after a while (she still has ten children with Henry), it is Diane's dabbling in politics, siding with the de Guises for her own gain, that she dislikes. This plotline is only resolved when Henry dies near the start of part seven, after which Catherine finally has the power to banish Diane from court and end her influence. But with Catherine's son Francis now king, she immediately acquires a new adversary in the form of Francis's wife Mary.
I expect I will soon watch the second season of this, which promises to be different from the first season in that it will need to have a different setup - we have already seen Catherine's backstory, so I can't see it repeating the flashback style of the first season, and Catherine is now established as Queen Mother and Regent (season one ends with her second son Charles as king, but he is only ten years old), so she has already proved herself as the political mastermind who can get to the top of the tree, and therefore I rather expect the next season to be about her attempts at staying there.
Oh, and is that snakes-and-chessboard title sequence a deliberate homage to the start of Blackadder II?
