The Royals: guaranteed to be the trashiest thing on TV
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Version 0 of 1. Amid all its troubled antiheroes and fatalistic gunplay, the golden age of television has been desperately short of one thing: trash. Not your common or garden, lowest common denominator, mass market, light entertainment crap – switch on your TV after 5pm on any given Saturday and you’ll practically drown in the stuff – but knowing, high-drama, campy trash. Trash such as Footballers’ Wives and Desperate Housewives. We’ve come close – Scandal is clearly preposterous but takes itself slightly too seriously, and House of Cards perpetually seems seconds away from turning into a full-scale Frankie Howerd parody of itself – but it has always been hard to shake the feeling that most modern showrunners have been too busy eyeing up prestige to fully commit to trash. Thank God, then, for Mark Schwahn and his forthcoming series The Royals. It is an American-made drama about a present-day British royal family. Liz Hurley plays the Queen. Joan Collins plays the Queen Mum. If those last 11 words didn’t immediately fill your heart with uncontrollable joy, there’s a good chance that you’re a lost cause. Obviously, The Royals isn’t about the royal family. Liz Hurley doesn’t play Queen Elizabeth II, because that would quite patently be weird. Instead, she plays Queen Helena – a sort of cross between near-future Kate Middleton and parallel-universe, still-alive Princess Diana, who spends most of her days peering and plotting and booming things like “FML” in her hilarious sledgehammer of a monotone. Collins, meanwhile, appears to be playing an extended version of her “Zip it, shrimpy” chocolate bar advert character, which is the best possible news for everyone. #TheRoyals are bored and horny. FML. https://t.co/zuC1j2XatH The newest trailer for The Royals – the series doesn’t debut until March – presents the show as both cartoonishly debauched and pleasingly self-aware. Helena’s son is played by whichever actor happens to have the closest DNA match to Prince William, while her daughter is a drugged-up Skins-alike who seems to spend about 75% of her time on-screen bopping around in her knickers. There are sword fights and fire-eaters, and people driving Range Rovers into red telephone boxes. Best of all, Hurley doesn’t seem to be able to say the word “England” without sounding like she’s being waterboarded with several gallons of jelly. It looks as if The Royals might be a brilliant television programme. And if it isn’t brilliant, it will almost definitely be watchably terrible; if hate-watching wasn’t such a depressing notion, this looks like it would be perfectly ripe for it. Either way, its American network E! obviously has faith, because the series has already been renewed before a single episode has aired. And yet, at the back of your mind, you have to wonder whether even a deliberately tawdry TV show where the flight attendant from Passenger 57 plays a monarch married to a man called King Simon can top the real-life ridiculousness of the actual royal family. Will the divorces and scandals and deaths match those of their real-life counterparts? Will there be male pattern baldness? At this point, it’s hard to say. But even if The Royals can’t trump the unmatched silliness of the royals, at least it looks certain to be the trashiest thing on TV. If it’s done well, that’s no bad thing at all. |