A Very British Scandal: Wealth, Cruelty, Smoking
Photo Courtesy of Prime Video
After Netflix’s recent dirge Anatomy of a Scandal, I was hoping that Amazon Prime Video’s A Very British Scandal would serve up some actual scandal. Shock me! Make me gasp! What tawdry affairs might we see? Show me how depraved these rich people really are!
Despite excellent casts and one (British Scandal) being based on a true story, neither series has lived up to this potential. They each take themselves very, very seriously, which is a shame especially because A Very British Scandal’s forbearer, A Very English Scandal, had a nice touch of satire and whimsy to it that was grounded in a genuinely emotional story.
A Very British Scandal follows the (true) 1963 divorce of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll (Claire Foy) and Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll (Paul Bettany). What rocked the tabloids at the time was the salacious nature of the divorce, which suggested that the Duchess had had multiple affairs, the evidence of which included a Polaroid photograph of her fellating a man whose face is not shown, but who is definitely not her husband.
What Sarah Phelps’ three-part series (originally released in the UK on BBC One, but hitting American shores on Prime Video) aims to do is give context to the person of Margaret, and repair her reputation while showing what an utter horror her husband was. But really, neither of them come off particularly well. Margaret is a rude liar and a manipulator, Ian is an abusive alcoholic and drug user. They get to know one another while he’s married and she’s going through a divorce, exchanging biting barbs that will turn acidic during their marriage. She’s the daughter of a millionaire, he inherits a castle. They smoke a ton.
In 2022, the charges brought against Margaret by her husband are certainly not very scandalous at all, and A Very British Scandal could have done more to show us who Margaret even is to make things more interesting. In these three episodes, we don’t get much of a sense of her, or her life before she met Ian. Yet neither seem particularly remarkable; both are overly confident, spoiled, and emotionally stunted from absentee parents (a cycle they perpetuate as well). The series loves showing us flashbacks, though, of Margaret once falling down an elevator shaft. We never find out how or why she fell 40 feet down an elevator shaft, nor anything about how apparently she was told she would never walk again, but is now fine. We never see her interact with her children, nor do we know what she wants other than an appreciation for Ian’s castle, which she paid to restore.