The Great is a romance disguised as a court comedy

Billed as an occasionally-true story of Catherine the Great, and accurate about almost nothing, which it announces cheerfully in the opening credits.

Why it belongs here

Underneath the court intrigue it is a genuine romance, and an unusual one: two people who are politically obliged to destroy each other and keep failing to want to.

The relationship between Catherine and Peter is the best-written adversarial romance on television. It is not enemies-to-lovers in the usual sense — they never stop being enemies. They just also cannot stop.

The comedy

Extremely profane and very fast. The register is deliberately anachronistic, closer to a modern workplace comedy than a period drama, and the jokes are frequently brutal.

Nicholas Hoult plays Peter as a man who is monstrous and also genuinely pitiable, sometimes in the same sentence. It is a difficult performance and it holds the whole thing together.

The tonal risk

The show swings between farce and real horror, sometimes within a scene. When it works it is exhilarating. When it does not — mostly in the second season — it feels unstable.

Tone and commitment

Funny, sharp, quite dark. Three seasons, hour-long episodes. Season one is the strongest and works as a complete thing if you want to stop there.