If you felt – as I did – that there had been an interminably long wait for season three of The Great , which appeared in the US back in May 2023, you are only partially correct. Rather than being lost somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic (presumably where season three of Hacks is currently bobbing), the third installment of The Great did in fact air here last July on Lionsgate+, a little known streaming service that no longer exists. And although – huzzah! – it now arrives on Channel 4 where hopefully audiences will rediscover it, its return is bittersweet: the series was cancelled almost a year ago.
This is the last exquisite taste we will get of Elle Fanning ’s idealistic young Empress Catherine of Russia and her moronic husband Peter (Nicholas Hoult). Let us savour every moment. Of TV’s many recent reimagined histories, The Great is proudly the most debauched.
Creator Tony McNamara, who co-wrote The Favourite , has thankfully still not been introduced to the concept of subtlety. Like an extended, X-rated episode of Horrible Histories , if this lot aren’t fornicating, they’re fighting and none of them have met a pastry that can’t be eaten suggestively. It is glass-smashing, vodka-necking, backstabbing, orgy-throwing excess and all the better for it.
The final season opens with a double bill in which we return to the 18th century’s most mutually destructive couple in marriage counselling. Understandable – at the end of the last series, Peter literall.
