A world built to make people dream
With its grand palaces, ceremonies and sumptuous dresses, royalty comes with a visual imagination that is immediately recognisable. Like major historical dramas, it takes viewers back in time and introduces them to the customs and social codes of another era. In Victoria, the recreation of 19th-century England is central to the pleasure of the show. On our watch list, the series also reveals a world that is usually out of reach: the private life of a royal family and the corridors of power.
Behind the palace doors
Kings and queens are among the best-known public figures, but also among the most protected. People know their faces, their role and their official appearances, but not always what goes on behind palace doors. Series make it possible to lift the curtain on this more intimate side of their existence and imagine what happens away from public view. How do they live as a couple, as a family, or through disagreement?
Series provide a necessarily fictional answer to those questions. They give viewers the feeling of witnessing private conversations, arguments and moments of doubt that unfold far from the public stage. Romantic relationships, family tensions, jealousy or grief can then be explored through drama. These are situations with which viewers can identify, despite the distance between themselves and these characters.
When history meets fiction
The fact that these characters really existed gives fiction an added dimension. Series can imagine dialogue, fill in the gaps or take liberties with the facts, but they are based on real people and on events that actually happened.
That is notably the case with Victoria or The Crown. We sometimes know the fate of their characters or the major events that will mark their reign, but we want to discover how they lived through those moments, what happened around them and what may have taken place away from the historical record.
At just 18, Victoria accedes to the throne and becomes one of the most powerful women of her time. She must then learn to govern, assert herself in a largely male world and reconcile her role as sovereign with her life as a woman, wife and mother. Fiction makes it possible to immerse viewers in her daily life and private world.
A subject that can be endlessly reinvented
Successions, arranged marriages, sibling rivalries, betrayals, scandals, wars and alliances: royalty offers screenwriters particularly rich material. A family disagreement can become a political crisis, a marriage can seal an alliance and questions of inheritance or succession can alter the fate of a kingdom. Royal families also provide a setting especially suited to the serial format, with several generations, alliances that form and break, and conflicts that can continue over multiple episodes. And unlike a fully invented universe, history offers centuries of stories to draw on, with new characters and events to explore.
This richness also allows royalty to appear in very different forms, from the historical drama of Victoria or The Crown to satire in The Great, via comedy with Kaamelott or fantasy with Game of Thrones.
Find Victoria on Netflix.