The Great · Season 1 · Hulu
The Great Season 1
The Great Season 1 is a MUST-WATCH, BollyMeter 8.4/10. 10 episodes on Hulu from 15 May 2020.
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What BollyAI Thinks
The Great premiered May 15, 2020 on Hulu, written by Tony McNamara, adapting his own stage play after his Oscar nomination for The Favourite. The show sets its terms in the title card: an occasionally true story. Catherine (Elle Fanning) arrives in Russia as a young bride to Emperor Peter (Nicholas Hoult), finds him a buffoon and a brute, and begins plotting a coup. The series leans on the performances, with Fanning’s comic timing and Hoult’s gleeful idiocy driving a mix of anachronism and gore. It occupies a clear lane: caustic feminist revisionism delivered through period farce, and Season 1 commits to it.
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- E1And We're Off8.7
The Great's premiere arrives with its thesis in the title card: 'An Occasionally True Story.' Tony McNamara's Catherine the Great comedy deploys Elle Fanning's Catherine arriving in Russia for her marriage to Nicholas Hoult's Peter III - and immediately makes clear this is not a historical drama but a comic argument about power, intelligence, and institutional stupidity. The premiere's formal confidence is complete from the first scene.
The moment: Catherine's first dinner at the Russian court - her genuine excitement meeting the reality of Peter's Russia, staged as the series' central comic and political thesis in a single scene.
Full review of E1 →