If you felt – as I did – that there had been an interminably long wait for season three of The Great, which appeared in the US back in May 2023, you are only partially correct. Rather than being lost somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic (presumably where season three of Hacks is currently bobbing), the third instalment of The Great did in fact air here last July on Lionsgate+, a little-known streaming service that no longer exists.
And although – huzzah! – it now arrives on Channel 4 where hopefully audiences will rediscover it, its return is bittersweet: the series was cancelled almost a year ago. This is the last exquisite taste we will get of Elle Fanning’s idealistic young Empress Catherine of Russia and her moronic husband Peter (Nicholas Hoult). Let us savour every moment.
Of TV’s many recent reimagined histories, The Great is proudly the most debauched. Creator Tony McNamara, who co-wrote The Favourite, has thankfully still not been introduced to the concept of subtlety. Like an extended, X-rated episode of Horrible Histories, if this lot aren’t fornicating, they’re fighting and none of them have met a pastry that can’t be eaten suggestively. It is glass-smashing, vodka-necking, backstabbing, orgy-throwing excess and all the better for it.
The final season opens with a double bill in which we return to the 18th century’s most mutually destructive couple in marriage counselling. Understandable – at the end of the last series, Peter literally shagged Catherine’s mother out of a window (she died) and in response, Catherine tried to kill him but ended up accidentally stabbing a lookalike. Anyone would need therapy after that.
While Catherine asserts her authority, Peter is reduced to stay-at-home dad, carting their baby son Paul around in a hilarious fur-trimmed BabyBjörn (The Great’s attention to absurd detail is unparalleled) and busying himself with inventing flavoured salt.
But life is lonely at the top. Not only is Catherine at odds with her most trusted allies, the radical Count Orlo (Sacha Dhawan) and her best friend Marial (Phoebe Fox), but as everyone keeps reminding her, her attempts to enlighten Russia are not going spectacularly well. At least there are distractions: her arrested aristocrats are facing the punishment of “bullet or bear” (exactly as it sounds), the King of Sweden (a brilliantly hammy Freddie Fox) is brawling with Voltaire at the dinner table and in international relations, both a smarmy England and a brash young America are vying for Russia’s support, allowing for plenty of knowing gags about both country’s foreign policies.
Plot-wise, The Great is preposterous in the extreme, chucking around high stakes with the breeziness of a toddler smashing up a Lego set. Its willingness to kill off a major character at the end of the first episode emphasises that anything could happen.
But in Fanning and Hoult, The Great has performers who reign supreme over the chaos. Fanning’s Catherine is a self-confessed “delusional optimist” given to delivering rousing speeches but reluctant to be as ruthless as she needs to be. Meanwhile Hoult’s Peter, a self-involved, impulsive brat, is very much a descendent of Blackadder’s Prince George. Both actors take these characters and elevate them – their actions may be overblown but there’s a surprising nuance and empathy to their emotional arcs.
With so much “acclaimed” TV to watch these days, and some of it feeling more like hard work than pleasure, The Great is genuine barnstorming entertainment. I wish this were not its swansong but at least it goes out doing what it loved – making a holy show of itself.
‘The Great’ is streaming on Channel 4 from Monday