TV Review: "Mary & George" Writes Queer Desire Back into History
The new Starz series deftly twines black comedy and costume into an infectious tale of queer lust run amuck in the halls of power.
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If ever there was a series that seems to have been tailor-made for me, it would have to be Mary & George, the newest costume drama from Starz. For one thing, it stars Julianne Moore, who remains one of my absolute favorite actresses and, for another, it also stars the pouty-faced and angelic Nicholas Galitzine. Add to that the fact that it’s a costume drama about one of the most notorious queer relationships in the history of the British monarchy, and you have a show that I would gladly have injected right into my veins. For this week, I’m just going to focus on the first three episodes, and next week you’ll get my insights on the concluding four.
When the series begins Mary Villiers (Moore) is at the mercy of her tyrannical husband and saddled with several ineffectual children. Mary, however, isn’t content to just languish in obscurity, and when her husband dies as the result of a fall down the stairs, she quickly remarries and makes plans to have her son, George (Galitzine), forged into a seductive weapon that she can aim right at the heart of power. Soon the two of them are firmly enmeshed at the center of King James’ (Tony Curran) court, and it’s not long before the cock-addled monarch has his eyes on George. The stage is set for one of the most extraordinary rises to power of the 17th century.
Moore is in her element as Mary, a woman who has had to claw and scratch and fight for every bit of privilege she’s ever had. Unlike George, who begins the series as a bit of a hopelessly naive romantic–she knows that the world in which they live is a dog-eat-dog realm where one is either predator or prey. Strange as it might seem, she sees in her secondborn son a kindred spirit, for neither of them are expected to be much in this highly patriarchal world in which primogeniture is still the order of the day. However, none of this is enough to keep her down for long and, with a Machiavellian grasp of court politics, she manages to secure them both a swift rise. To be sure, she has her fair share of upsets and setbacks, particularly when she first arrives at court in outdated fashions and makeup, but Mary is nothing if not resourceful and determined. Moore plays her with just the right kind of icy precision, and she delivers biting political commentary with as much aplomb as she does her jibes.
This isn’t to say that Mary is entirely devoid of human feeling, and one of her more remarkable relationships–outside of the one with George–is with the Irish prostitute Sandie (superbly portrayed by Niamh Algar). Even here, though, it’s clear that Mary sees the other woman as another route by which she can attain power and influence, though in this case it’s by sending her off on missions to the London underworld. For a woman like Mary–whose own birth in obscure circumstances has left her with a titanic chip on her soldier–all bodies are meant to be exploited, including her own.
And then there’s Nicholas. As in Red, White and Royal Blue, in which he also played a tortured and sensitive queer royal, here he brings a remarkable amount of brooding depth and melancholy to a young nobleman whose only worth seems to be in what pleasures he can offer others. He learns some harsh lessons at his mother’s knee, one of the most important of which is that it is vital to never show weakness, not even to those whom one loves. With his pouty lips and his effete face Galitzine is the perfect person to play Villiers, a man who wasn’t afraid to use his closeness to the king to get what he wanted, even though his own life was fated to meet a tragic end. Galitzine’s George is equal parts wounded angel and malicious demon, and it’s fascinating to watch him move so effortlessly between these two registers.
I’ll admit that I was afraid the series would render James into little more than a buffoon and a caricature, both because this was implied in the trailers and because that seemed to be the opinion of many of his contemporaries. Fortunately this isn’t the case in the series itself, at least not so far. Indeed, Tony Curran imbues the middle-aged monarch with a remarkable strain of humanity, and it’s clear that, though he might be quite the slave to his libido and to the young male favorites he gathers around him–as Mary herself puts it very early in the series, “he’s so cock-struck it's like a curse–he’s very much aware of his own foibles.
Mary & George is, at bottom, a tale of power, and of how those who are born without it can use their bodies and the ebb and flow of desire to ingratiate themselves with those at the top. The production is suitably lush, juxtaposing brightly-lit scenes of courtly entertainment with darker, more sinister settings in which bodies (particularly male ones) are intertwined in configurations as shifting as the tides of courtly power. As always, desire is a key part of any costume drama–as the ongoing success of Bridgerton demonstrates–and Mary & George puts this center stage. Desire is dark and seductive and alluring, and it is also dangerous and deadly, for while attracting the roving eye of the king can allow one to attain privilege and status, it can also prime one for a spectacular fall, as Laurie Davidson’s Somerset discovers to his great dismay. One of the most striking and disturbing scenes in the first three episodes occurs near the end of “Not So Much Love as by Awe,” in which George gives in to the blandishments of his erstwhile ally, who now claims to have loved him all along. However, while the latter assumes that their little liaison will be enough to get him a pardon, George makes it clear that he just wanted to fuck him, even going so far as to tell him he should think on their union as he hangs for murder. Even at this early stage in the story power has begun to take its toll on our sultry young noble, and it surely won’t be long before he begins his full fall into depravity.
Like others, I think there are many similarities–both tonal and thematic–between Mary & George and Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite. While the Stuarts might lack the dynamism and charisma of their Tudor forebears, in some ways their sexual indiscretions were even more fascinating and tragic, which may help to explain why their stories–which also, not coincidentally, are markedly queerer than those of the Tudors–have made for compelling dramedies in the 21st century. Fortunately Mary & George isn’t nearly as grotesque as The Favourite; in fact, it’s a show brimming with unbridled queer sex and lust and desire. Given the extent to which the costume drama as a genre has tended to tip-toe around queerness, it’s quite refreshing to see a take on the period that is unabashedly and even hysterically queer. The series writes queer desire back into history, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.