The Great · Season 1 · Episode 1 · 15 May 2020
S1E1 And We're Off
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.
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...
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
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The Great's premiere earns its 90% Rotten Tomatoes score through the specific intelligence of Tony McNamara's anachronistic approach. The deliberately ahistorical Catherine - all modern interiority and contemporary language - in collision with 18th-century Russian court brutality is the comic engine that the premiere establishes with complete confidence. Elle Fanning makes Catherine's transition from romantic idealism to strategic political thinking feel real rather than schematic. Nicholas Hoult's Peter III is the series' formal gamble: a character who is simultaneously monstrous and genuinely funny, whose complexity is established in the pilot as the reason the show avoids simple feminist parable. A debut hour that announces a series operating at the top of its genre.