The Great review: Russian history reimagined as lewd, timely comedy

Every episode of The Great begins with the disclaimer that you are watching “an occasionally true story”. The line itself is a cute half-truth. Though the 10-part miniseries, premiering today on Channel 4, gleefully diverges from historical fact in its account of the rise of Catherine the Great, the story it tries to tell is urgent and, at heart, truthful.

In depicting the younger years of the famed Russian monarch, The Great builds comedy from tragedy. Catherine (Elle Fanning) starts the story wide-eyed and optimistic, about to move from Prussia to Russia, to marry the emperor, Peter III (Nicholas Hoult). But that changes as soon as she meets her husband-to-be, a boorish brute who plunges Catherine into a world of crass, sadistic sexism. He buys her a bear as a wedding gift, but then shoots it. He has sex with her while carrying on a conversation with someone else. He abuses her physically. Elsewhere, his behaviour is no better: military strategists and advisors also suffer under his fits of rage and hubris. It should come as no surprise to anyone well-versed in Russian history that Catherine eventually decides enough is enough, and begins scheming for revenge, and liberation.

The Great is nearly as coarse and unsubtle as its insufferable villain, although this is much more by design. As a historical drama, it is teeming with deliberate anachronisms – from Hoult’s distinctly modern haircut to the dialogue, which vacillates between faux-18th-century formality and laddish modern vernacular. Catherine’s lines lean towards the former, while her husband tends to adopt the latter: tucking in to a royal banquet, he exclaims, “This f***ing duck is delicious.”

Its cast are no strangers to period fare: Fanning starred in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, while Hoult featured in Yorgos Lanthimos’s austere 2018 comedy The Favourite. The Great’s creator, Tony McNamara, was a co-writer on The Favourite; the tonal and visual similarities are hard to miss (plus, they are probably the only two pieces of period fiction to ever use the word “c**t-struck”).

There is drama, and pathos, baked into Catherine’s story – what could be more thrilling than a coup? – and scenes are strengthened by a solid supporting cast that includes Phoebe Fox, Adam Godley and Sacha Dhawan, who plays the emperor’s bookish, good-natured advisor Orlo. Hoult is given a lot of space to show off his character’s foul charisma; Fanning measures her performance with more restraint.

At roughly 50 minutes each, episodes run long for a comedy; its sharply cruel sense of humour may have worked better in shorter bursts. But The Great is timely TV, maybe self-consciously so. Rumbling underneath its dissonant mix of history and modernity, there are some keen observations about men, women, and power. Often ugly but sometimes hopeful, they are as true now as they ever were.