The Serpent Queen review — modern imagining of Catherine de Medici’s life is enormous fun

“You should know that France is a shithole. But if you play your cards right, you could be a princess in that shithole, which, on balance, beats being a commoner here.” So says Pope Clement VII (Charles Dance) to his young niece, Catherine de Medici (Liv Hill), whose marriage to Prince Henri of France will, it is hoped, bring about stability in Europe. It remains unclear whether the vocabulary of a 16th-century pope included the word “shithole”, but any historical nit-picking has no place here.

In dispensing with the conventions of period drama, The Serpent Queen joins The Great, a comedy of manners based on Russia’s Catherine II, and The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos’s riotous portrait of Queen Anne, in offering a more relaxed take on historical figures. With its spicy language and Fleabag-esque glances to camera, this very modern imagining of Catherine’s life is enormous fun.

Here the Medici are envied for their wealth and loathed for their common blood. Despite being patrons of the Renaissance, they are particularly despised by the French, who see their use of forks at the dinner table as evidence of their barbarian ways. Orphaned as an infant, Catherine spends her childhood at a convent before being kidnapped by the Holy Roman Emperor’s soldiers. Salvation comes from her uncle, who decides she could be useful in defrosting Franco-Italian relations. And so, laden with jewels to make up for her plain features (her idea), she is carried off to France in a giant golden egg (also her idea), in order to bag her prince.

The series uses a conversation between the older Catherine (played with simmering menace by Samantha Morton) and a bullied servant girl, Rahima (Sennia Nanua), as its narrative framework. Keen to let the young girl know that she too was once powerless and reviled, Catherine relays her story via flashback. At this point, we understand that her husband, the Dauphin, is dead, along with her eldest son, Francis, leaving her as regent for her second son, 10-year-old Charles IX. Now the greatest threat to her future is her dead son’s widow, Mary Queen of Scots, who makes no secret of her desire to rid herself, and France, of her calculating mother-in-law.

The Serpent Queen gleefully harnesses the myths that have shaped Catherine’s legacy — namely that she was into black magic and she liked to poison her enemies — all the while viewing her with an uneasy admiration. The title of the first episode, “Medici Bitch”, is perhaps overdoing things, but it nonetheless fits with the narrative of a woman who did what was necessary to hold her own in a court dominated by men either drunk on machismo or just drunk.

The same episode ends, thrillingly, with Patti Smith’s “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo”, which begins with the immortal line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”. Morton’s Catherine is a sinner all right but, in her life-long quest for survival, she sees no reason to repent.

★★★★☆

On StarzPlay from September 11