Meet "The Serpent Queen"

I was not planning to write anything about "The Serpent Queen" for this blog.  I only started watching the STARZ historical drama when the first season showed up on Prime, and dropped it after a few episodes.  However, learning that it had been canceled after two seasons, I went ahead and finished it, and found myself disappointed that we weren't getting more.  The second season doesn't end on a cliffhanger, but there is definitely room for  continuation if you know your European history.  "The Serpent Queen" of the title is Catherine De' Medici (Liv Hill as a teenager, Samantha Morton as an adult), wife of King Henry II (Lee Ingleby), and eventual mother of three other French kings.  She was one of the most powerful women of her era, and thoroughly embroiled in plots and machinations both in and out of France.

"The Serpent Queen" has a lot in common with "The Great," another series about a famous Catherine, which made a point of straying wildly from actual history.  "The Serpent Queen" sticks closer to the facts, but uses many of the same storytelling devices - modern profanity, color-blind casting, and plenty of invented characters.  Catherine's maid and confidante Rahima (Sennia Nanua in season one, Emma McDonald in season two) gives us an outsider's POV.  When tackling the wars of the religion between the Protestants and Catholics, an ambitious religious leader named Edith (Jesper Jones) is created as a figurehead for the Protestant Huguenots to give Catherine a more prominent adversary.  Also, where "The Great" is a comedy, "The Serpent Queen" is a fairly straight historical drama with the occasional vein of black humor.  The first season is about the older Catherine dealing with a succession crisis while telling Rahima about how she first came to France as a teenager, and had to fight for her place at court.  The second covers Catherine's relationships with her adult children and the progress of the religious wars, leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in the finale.    

The first and second seasons often feel like different shows.  Because of the time gap, hardly any of the cast carries over between seasons, and several prominent roles are recast in the latter half.  The flashbacks and parallel stories are only a device in the first season.  However, both sets of episodes are well-written and well-executed, and I enjoyed both seasons equally.  It's a little disappointing that Catherine and Rahima have smaller roles in the second season, in order to make room for characters like King Charles IX (Bill Milner), the Duke of Anjou (Stanley Morgan), and the members of the eternally scheming Guise and Bourbon families.  The series boasts a great supporting cast, with Ludivine Sagnier as a particular highlight playing Catherine's chief rival, Diane de Poitiers.  Guest stars include Charles Dance, Rupert Everett, and Minnie Driver as Queen Elizabeth I.  

 However, Samantha Morton's performance as Catherine is the primary reason to watch the show.  Catherine is everything we want a secret mastermind to be - seemingly cold and uncaring, but deeply invested in the lives of her loved ones, and brilliantly capable of pulling off some really dramatic, entertaining manipulations and stratagems.  In this universe, she's a subtle character surrounded by very emotional ones, and she's always the least showy and most controlled.  It's fun to watch the younger version work her way up from underdog to power player, and poignant to see the older version struggle with the personal cost.  We don't see enough of Morton onscreen these days, and she was a big reason why I was interested in this series in the first place.

I don't know enough about the time period to say much about the accuracy of "The Serpent Queen," but there have clearly been a lot of artistic liberties taken.  There are no obvious anachronisms, but the production design and costumes look far too pristine for any of this to remotely pass muster with the history buffs.  However, I think it's to the show's credit that I completely bought into all of it.  The larger than life approach fits a modern retelling of history that gives Catherine her due - as the ugly duckling who doesn't grow up to be a swan, but the most powerful woman on all the land.  

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