Why is this particular cluster of one-hour episodes topping the Netflix charts?
Rich women with a lot of feelings are crack to me, as they navigate being both liberated and held captive by their money. The things these women sacrifice! The biting of their tongues! The forest-y decals in their kitchens! Extreme wealth is always captivating, if only by way of having live-in staff and more Max Mara coats than you could wear in a lifetime.
Perhaps it’s all the power? Rupert Friend is compartmentally hot—all the pieces are there for heat—but the temperature runs in the minuses. There’s simply nothing less sexy than a Tory MP, especially one who’s so particular about which women he treats with respect, and which ones he disdains. His sense of his own familial legacy is frankly revolting; the idea that family cannot fail, even at the expense of truth, perversely prevails. It’s hard to look away from his Machiavellian power plays.
Or perhaps it’s the show’s overt Britishness I can’t get enough of? The stately House of Commons canteen. The stiff upper lip-ness.is both a frothy and forensic look at dishonor, silly in is rather out-there anti-reality TV effects—Sienna falls through the courtroom like Alice down the rabbit hole; Friend is involved in a rather nasty hit-and-run with an invisible clown car.
But there’s something distinctly British about the idea of scandal, which I find both endlessly fascinating and unbearably familiar. Something about being a Brit sets one quite deeply in one’s ways and customs. We’re regimentally refinedwholly ridiculous. We’re as exhausting as we are eccentric. We’re nuts and we all sort of agree to bask in it rather than call it out.