Mary & George ★★★★
Binge

With a scything tongue and a sharp eye for power’s cruel imperatives, this British historical drama is a revisionist joy. A risen-from-the-ranks story set in the early 17th century court of Britain’s King James I that has a killer turn from Julianne Moore as a minor noble with major ambitions, it remakes the corsets and cravat genre as explicitly queer, venomously witty, and knowingly cruel. Imagine if The Tudors was remade by Ryan Murphy, and you’re on track.

Inspired by Benjamin Wooley’s 2018 non-fiction book, The King’s Assassin, the story focuses on the newly widowed Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham (Moore). A hard-nosed pragmatist with no income, she decides that her second son, the very beautiful George (Nicholas Galitzine), should do more than marry for a wealthy family’s dowry. Mary sets a willing George on the risky path of seducing King James I (Tony Curran). His majesty, she’s reliably informed, is “a dead-eyed horny horror”, so the odds are decent.

It would be easy, but nonetheless incorrect, to describe Mary & George as a romp. It has a rattling narrative and laugh-out-loud mishaps, but it consistently aligns the harsh and even tragic with the lascivious and eccentric. “There are rules for those who rule,” George is told during an eye-opening stay at a French finishing school, and power is predicated in one scene after another, whether it’s the first sexual encounter between George and the monarch or a courtier trying to dismiss Mary once her son gains traction.

The production design has a mucky, tactile feel, and the view of court eschews textbook cliché. The bisexual King James, having married and issued heirs, prefers men in his bed, so palace life openly accommodates it. Mary’s collaborators aren’t particularly bothered by the king’s sexuality, they just want his favourite to be English and not a Scot, like the capricious incumbent, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset (Laurie Davidson).

Creator D.C. Moore, a playwright who contributed to Emerald Fennell’s season of Killing Eve, mixes historical figures with sexual frankness, and he keeps adding intriguing elements, such as Mary finding a confidante and pleasure of her own in Irish sex worker Andie (Niamh Algar). None of the main characters are merely their defining outline, as moments of tenderness or self-awareness seep through the machinations. At the centre of it all Moore is flinty fierce, playing a woman who will waste no more of her life merely enduring. What a ferocious, funny take on the period drama this is.

The Gentlemen ★★½
Netflix

If nothing else Guy Ritchie is conscientious. In loosely reframing his 2019 London crime caper into a Netflix series, the British filmmaker has written and directed multiple episodes that set a familiar tone and even allow for the odd surprise. Even if you haven’t seen the original drug empire romp, which starred Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam and a verminous Hugh Grant, this eight-episode addition doesn’t feel essential. But it’s competent.