The CW has gone into the history business — and it may be the end of us.
The “Gossip Girl” network has chosen as its first subject the doomed Scottish monarch Mary, Queen of Scots — she of the three husbands, plot to assassinate her rival to the British throne, Queen Elizabeth I and the nearly 20 years spent in prison before her eventual beheading.
Given the right script, the right actress (Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave both played Mary in the movies) and sumptuous costumes, it could be a classy, engrossing production.
And then there’s “Reign.”
This history lesson for the Twitter generation takes a bunch of reasonably attractive Millennials, suits them up in petticoats and jerkins and then asks them to sound as if they lived in 1557 — when Mary’s story begins, at a French convent where Mary (Adelaide Kane) is being hidden from her enemies.
After a quick game of dodge ball with the nuns, Mary discovers that someone is trying to poison her, and she is whisked away to the French court, home of her intended, Prince Francis (Toby Regbo).
That’s where the problems begin. Every time you think of Mary’s true story — the one filmmakers such as Laurie McCarthy and Frank Siracusa keep returning to — the show consistently pales in comparison. We know Mary eventually married Francis II (they had been betrothed since age 6), but Kane and Regbo have zero chemistry. Kane is a winsome lass, but lacks the charisma to carry a show, reciting without much conviction lines such as “I don’t expect you to love me on sight, but don’t you think we owe it to our families and our countries to give it a chance?”
So banal is much of the action, which includes near-rapes — and grim prophecies from Nostradumus no less — that all the actors look like they’re playing dress-up. Mary’s inane ladies-in-waiting look like they stepped out of Kleinfeld’s and don’t do much more than titter, sputter and, well, gossip.
The show’s only juicy scene has already been censored. After a wedding, Mary and her gossip girls sneak off for a voyeuristic peek at the bride and groom’s bedding ceremony. This medieval practice, where court elders discreetly witnessed a new husband deflowering his wife, gets Mary’s posse all hot and bothered and one young woman finds a dark corridor where she can raise her petticoats and, shall we say, take matters in hand? Little does she know the French king (Alan Van Sprang) is right behind, to help her finish the job.
Such prurience doesn’t jibe with the show’s tone — which strives to appeal to a demographic that may not even know who Mary, Queen of Scots was — while telling one of the more interesting chapters in British history. It succeeds at neither. History fans will scoff at this rendition of a famous story and the target audience won’t give a royal tweet about it.