The Great

While apparently even historically inaccurate compared to an old Marlene Dietrich movie, The Great is a fantastically entertaining piece of nonsense with Elle Fanning giving a quirky, very funny performance as Catherine and Nicholas Hoult giving a funny, infuriating one as Peter (also a shout out to Phoebe Fox's snarky servant).

The series is consistently entertaining, generally funny, sometimes shocking or horrific, and often just plain nuts. Catherine is an interesting character, both smart and foolish, both strategic and inept, but always moving forward with a blind, frequently insane determination. She's not always sympathetic, and her mistakes are costly, but she's never less than fascinating.

The last episode is a little confusing, and ends on a cliffhanger which doesn't help, but overall the series is wonderful and I look forward to seeing how it all plays out in the next season.

Quirky humour, great acting, certainly not trying to be historically accurate! Possibly the humour isn't slapstick enough for the initial reviewers. It's definitely worth the watch.

So just to get this out of the way: this show is anything but historically accurate. If you want one more like that, Russia-1's Ekaterina is like that.

But anyways, if you really want to find this show incredibly funny, read up on the history of Catherine the Great.

Also, to the person who did the editing for Season 1 Episode 8, why would you use "The Sacred War"?! I know historical accuracy wasn't on the table, but for gods sake don't intentionally mix up the eras (The Sacred War was written in 1941).

The first episode tried to set the stage as an over the top quirky dark comedy. Unfortunately I never really felt the humor was lol funny. It's certainly comical, but more due to the ridiculous nature of the show than for actual jokes/humor. It also gets pretty serious at times and comes across more like a drama especially by the end of the first season. It's inconsistent in that respect.

The cast, characters, set design, are all engrossing and make the show well worth the watch though. Elle Fanning is amazing as usual, but Nicholas Hoult is the stand out here. He plays an incredibly stupid, arrogant emperor and his performance often comes very close to the Joaquin Phoenix level sense of evil. You never know what he's going to do next.

While not a perfect show, and very odd, I am looking forward to the next season. Just don't go in expecting a brilliant comedy, or a historically accurate drama and you'll probably enjoy it as well.

The way how they play and remastering the history is genius! As being Russian, I find this show absurdly brilliant and funny. That's interesting to follow how the show is portraying current narratives with well known facts from 18 century, as it all together creates absolutely masterpiece satire Universe!