If you haven’t seen the lively Scoop, Netflix’s version of the catastrophic (for him) Prince Andrew Newsnight interview about his relationship with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, then you might find more to appreciate in A Very Royal Scandal. This is the second time the story has been given a “real events, fictionalised for dramatic purposes” preamble in the same year. As with Scoop, it’s a buffet of top-tier acting talent. Here, Ruth Wilson is Emily Maitlis, and takes the deep voice very seriously, while Michael Sheen is Prince Andrew, and Joanna Scanlan his adoring and doomed private secretary, Amanda Thirsk. The performances are predictably strong, but it lacks the heft you might expect from a such a heavyweight cast, and from a series that follows the excellent A Very English Scandal and A Very British Scandal.
Over three steady episodes, it follows Maitlis and her Newsnight team as they pursue the interview with, and allegations against, the Prince, before re-creating the interview and exploring the fallout. Scoop focused on the producer Sam McAlister, played by Billie Piper, and turned her dogged pursuit of the sit-down into a sort of thriller. This sidelines her almost completely. Instead, it sticks with Maitlis and the Prince, fleshing out their private lives and offering a more in-depth character portrait of each, as they move towards their shared fate. It is elegantly done, though it ambles forward rather than sprinting for the finish line.
That means Maitlis at home, with her husband and sons, having a post-work vodka, talking to her whippet and Googling the links between Epstein and Andrew. We join her as the BBC is under pressure from the right-wing press and the government for its seeming partisanship. Maitlis is rebuked for a Brexit-inspired, on-camera eye-roll, and while Paxman and Humphries would be applauded for that kind of thing, she says, she still feels she has to prove herself. The Andrew interview would be perfect. “I’m not losing out to bloody ITV,” she booms.
The TV industry stuff feels pleased with itself, particularly when it is placed against the absurdity of royal life, shown here to be a surreal catalogue of hunting, golf, fine dining and charades. This goes far deeper into Prince Andrew’s world than Scoop did, and you can see that it is fascinated with his psyche, and the question of not only why he would do the interview, but why he seemed to think, in the immediate aftermath, that it had gone rather well indeed.
We get to meet Fergie (Claire Rushbrook), loyal and amoral, who describes herself and Andrew as “the happiest divorcees in the world”, and has sent her ex-husband off to his old friend Epstein with “a fucking begging bowl” to settle her many debts. Sheen’s Andrew is a near-tragic buffoon, a man-child who believes that he is charm personified, but berates his staff with endless “fuck offs” and furious tirades. If the drama makes an effort to humanise him, it does so through his daughters, Beatrice (Honor Swinton Byrne) and Eugenie (Sofia Oxenham), who by the end appear to if not accept, then at least comprehend the mess their father has made.
A comparison to the later Crown here is inevitable, not least because this spends so much time in the royal households, and runs into the same problem of trying to dramatise very recent history, still fresh in the minds of most viewers. It is hard for it not to dip into caricature. Still, Sheen is great as the ranting Prince – “I am the second fucking son of the fucking sovereign” – but the underplayed star of the whole thing might be Alex Jennings, who plays the late Queen’s private secretary, Sir Edward Young, a smooth master of the old ways. He warns Thirsk against the Newsnight interview, explaining that the royals need protecting from themselves. They live a “frictionless existence”, he says. They will never know what it is to miss a train, because the train will always wait for them if they are late.
The fallout from the Newsnight interview had no intention of waiting for the Prince. This ends with a closeup of that 2001 photograph, of Andrew with the then 17-year-old Virginia Guiffre at Ghislaine Maxwell’s London home, re-created with the actors for both A Very Royal Scandal and Scoop, but also powerfully left in its original form in the final moments here. It is a reminder that this isn’t a simple case of a stupid man making a stupid mistake. When Maitlis replied to Andrew’s description of Epstein’s behaviour as “unbecoming”, she did so with an astonished rejoinder that Epstein was “a sex offender”. Like Maitlis, A Very Royal Scandal handles itself with comportment and class, but as a drama, it is too frictionless for its own good.
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