Despite its best efforts, A Very Royal Scandal is an uninteresting show featuring uninteresting people but with strong talent running the show. In a show shot somewhat like it exists as a segment on BBC News itself, it is the performances of the actors that carry this to the finish line and make it an engaging watch to the end. Telling the story you already know and have heard over and over again – including twice as a limited series on a streaming service this year, this show doesn’t add much to the downfall of Prince Andrew and fails to make Emily Maitis much more than a regular human with empathy.
This review was made possible by screeners provided by Prime Video.
A Very Royal Scandal explores Emily Maitlis’ journey as a Newsnight journalist and Prince Andrew’s disastrous interview with her.
In reality, the show very briefly touches on Maitlis’ past and instead focuses on the exact moments leading up to and following the interview. Ultimately, whilst the performances are engaging and the character moments sometimes interesting, it is nothing we do not already know. As much as the show tries to convince you something may be different, this is a story we already know, so it is impossible to find any tension in leading up to the interview or in wondering how the public might react to it because it already happened, recently, and it still is happening. The show retells events that have been told on national and international news many times, making it a good, but pointless watch.
The real star of the show is Ruth Wilson whom is undoubtedly believable as Maitis, even down to her exact accent. After watching the show’s version of the iconic interview, rewatching the original version highlights just how spot-on this casting is. The body language is exact and precise and the performances are enthralling – it is entertaining drama, but it is not intense.
One of the main issues that comes with adapting a well known story is that your narrative is already known and thus it is hard to retain viewers and keep an audience watching whilst being engaged for multiple hours. Unfortunately, this is true for A Very Royal Scandal. Whilst Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson try their best to add levels of nuance to these surface characters, it’s ultimately just a visual retelling of a story that we have all heard, and continue to hear to this day, multiple times.
Luckily for A Very Royal Scandal, it releases not long after Netflix’s Scoop, which is a terrible and overproduced telling of the same events with a much worse cast and less heart behind the story. It is worth noting that Emily Maitis, who the story is centred around, chose to dedicate her time to A Very Royal Scandal and herself praised it as being most accurate to what actually happened, saying little to nothing for the Netflix equivalent. It is with this comparison that it’s easy to say that this show is undoubtedly the best narrative retelling of the events and, if you are new to the story and have no idea what happened, is likely worth a watch. Perhaps not for the meaningless scenes of Maitis sitting around her house on her laptop and making pointless conversation with her husband, with her kids even appearing in at least two scenes because..we have to remember she’s human.
Michael Sheen’s performance as Prince Andrew is actually different to Rufus Sewell’s and all the better for it. Whilst he does include the babbling and ‘forgetful’ nature of Andrew, Sheen plays it more behind closed doors as the show gives an insight into Andrew’s private life and that is where he shines as he masterfully flips behind the private, sometimes accidentally too open Prince Andrew and the family man who worries too much about his negative press affecting his daughter’s wedding.
Ultimately though, despite the strong and powerful performance that Michael Sheen does bring, it is simply not interesting enough nor is he given anything interesting to do outside of the main interview. There are a few scenes of him being aware ‘something bad’ is coming out and having to deal with the consequences, but these are rarely felt and are limited to the staffers at Buckingham Palace appearing somewhat displeased, presumably not acting quite as strongly as the real Palace officials did.
The real question coming out of the show is – why does it exist? Sure, it might be fine watching good actors do a bit of small character work but what is the point if nothing new is being learned or if it isn’t even really that entertaining. There is a small conflict in the first episode surrounding how they are even going to get the interview to happen, which is possibly the most boring narrative they attend to build as it lasts one scene and is followed a few minutes later by a text stating that they had it, giving a real sense of the kind of tension they’re managing to build.
The main centre and hook of the show is the interview – the interview that aired on TV 5 years ago and is actively available to be watched in full on YouTube and various other places on the internet. The only additional given by this show is watching Rita Wilson walk around a house and pretend to be looking at a laptop for a few extra scenes whilst Michael Sheen does his best confused face at every line of dialogue being spoken to him. If you have the time to kill and are heavily invested in this narrative and the 3 days surrounding the interview then it is worth a watch. If that doesn’t appeal to you, just watch a highlight reel of the best parts of the real interview on YouTube.
A Very Royal Scandal is directed by Julian Jarrold, and written by Jeremy Brock. The series stars Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson as the respective Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis. All three episodes of the miniseries are streaming on Prime Video.
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