Thoughts On The First Episode Of Starz’s ‘Mary & George’
by Rachel Bellwoar
No network consistently delivers on entertaining, female-led period dramas more than Starz and, if this first episode is anything to go by, Mary & George promises to rank up there with their best (which, in this reviewer’s opinion, are The Spanish Princess and The Serpent’s Queen). While in the past a lot of Starz’s series have been adapted from books by Philippa Gregory (who writes historical fiction), Mary & George takes Benjamin Woolley’s non-fiction book, The King’s Assassin, for its source material.
Episode 1 begins at the very beginning with baby George’s birth, during which the ladies attending on Mary (Julianne Moore) accidentally drop George and think she might not have noticed. She did, but it doesn’t phase her.
From there, the show jumps forward twenty years to Mary finding George (now played by Nicholas Galitzine) trying to hang himself (more on that in a sec). Why the show felt the need to include that opening scene of Mary giving birth is a little unclear. Whatever depression George is dealing with now, his being dropped as a child doesn’t seem to have had any lasting effect. It’s actually his older brother, John (Tom Victor), who it’s suggested had a learning disability or suffered from mental illness.
If the opening achieves one thing, though, it does set the tone for the series while introducing viewers to Mary’s particular brand of tough love, but the whole episode is a testament to that. Mary’s reaction to her son’s suicide attempt, for example. I feel like period dramas love to show hangings going wrong or that they’re not these guaranteed, instant deaths that people expect. It genuinely looks like Mary’s arrived too late, yet somehow she knows George is still alive and doesn’t rush at all when cutting him down.
Aware that finding a wife for John is going to be difficult, Mary’s main goal is transforming George into an eligible bachelor who will rate a large dowry. Namely she wants to send him to France, which George is against (but that matters little to Mary). If Mary’s real ambitions aren’t apparent right away, they become so by the end of the episode, and yeah – it’s a twisted mother-son relationship. A lot of great TV has come out of that premise (think Bates Motel and The Sopranos) and what’s great about George is that while Mary is already a hardened fighter who has enough ambition on her own to carry the rest of her family, George starts the series fairly innocent, which means there’s a lot of room for his character to evolve in the subsequent episodes. There’s almost no question that Mary is going to create a monster out of him but he’s not cocky yet, so it’s all a matter of waiting and seeing.
FINAL VERDICT: Mary & George takes the decadence of Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and adds more sex and curse words. I will definitely be checking the other six episodes out.
New episodes of Mary & George air Fridays on Starz.
