A Very Royal Scandal Is an Actor’s Showcase that Interrogates Media’s Most Famous Train Wreck

If it feels like you’ve seen Prime Video’s A Very Royal Scandal before, it’s because you have. Sort of. It’s not just the second recent project about the car crash of a television interview that essentially ended the royal career of England’s Prince Andrew, it’s the second one to hit our screens in the last six months. Netflix’s Scoop, of course, is a bit different: it’s a film rather than a limited series, it’s based on different source material, and it revolves around the story of BBC producer Sam McAllister as much as it does either of the people who were onscreen for Newsnight’s most famous installment. But the impact of two such similar properties arriving one on top of the other does beg the question—what on Earth is the point? 

At its best, A Very Royal Scandal legitimately tries to answer that question, though it is more successful in raising additional, increasingly uncomfortable ones about elite privilege and the media consumption habits of our current moment. Unlike the Netflix film, a newsroom drama that details the specifics of how the BBC team put together that Newsnight installment, the Prime Video series uses its longer, three-episode run time to try and provide additional context for the events leading up to and following the infamous interview, giving us intriguing glimpses into how this incident rocked the monarchy and irrevocably changed the lives of both Prince Andrew (here played by Michael Sheen) and BBC journalist Emily Maitlis (Ruth Wilson). 

Its three episodes (all of which were available for review) have a distinct Prestige TV seriousness, but while it’s clear its take on the (pardon the pun) scandalous central interview is what people will likely tune in to see, the show itself, to its credit, does try to push beyond being a mere recreation. In fact, while Sheen and Wilson are dynamite together in the few scenes they share, A Very Royal Scandal’s most interesting elements are found outside those familiar moments.

The story revolves around one of modern media’s greatest trainwrecks, the hour-long BBC Newsnight interview in which Prince Andrew was grilled about a range of topics, from his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to the nature of his relationship with a woman named Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of statutory rape. The series follows the complicated process by which Andrew agreed to talk to the press in the wake of Epstein’s suicide, as well as Maitlis’ determination that she be the one sitting across from him when he ultimately did so. The sheer luck (or abject stupidity, depending on your perspective) that was necessary for all these disparate pieces to come together is nigh-on unbelievable, but Scandal does its best to faithfully document the choices made by Andrew, Maitlis’ team, and palace communications officers along the way. 

The show’s version of the fateful conversation between Andrew and Maitlis is uncomfortably tense television—truly, it’s still difficult to believe that the original ever aired—from the prince’s stumbling attempts to explain away his continued contact with Epstein, to his utter lack of sympathy for the victims, and his own bizarre alibis for the dates he was supposed to have met Giuffre. The fallout is predictably disastrous, resulting in an avalanche of social media mockery and public disdain. Although the series makes an effort to be even-handed in its depiction of the events surrounding the interview, it’s also clearly aware that viewers are here for the “scandal” aspect of the series title, and packs its episodes full of salacious details, whether of the specifics of the prince’s fall from grace or the embarrassing dressing downs his former aide Amanda Thirsk (Joanna Scanlan) receives from Queen Elizabeth’s bitchy private secretary Sir Edward Young (Alex Jennings). 

But A Very Royal Scandal is at its best in the interview’s aftermath, following the various threads of its global fallout, from the queen’s decision to essentially cut off her favorite son to Maitlis’ string of increasingly hollow award wins. Andrew’s (sometimes literal) scramble to avoid legal consequences—a sequence in which he flees a process server is unintentionally hilarious—and cringe attempts to improve his tarnished image is balanced by Maitlis’ personal reckoning with the celebrity her royal takedown generated, and an increasing confusion about becoming the center of a story she was only ever trying to report.

Wilson’s portrayal of Maitlis focuses on the tensions between the hard-hitting journalist and the real person: her genuine desire to hold the powerful to account, her struggles to be taken seriously in a man’s world despite all her professional success, her attempt to balance her marriage and family with a career in the public eye. But her performance is a generally restrained one. Sheen has a bit more freedom in his interpretation of the prince, given that much of the show’s assumptions about Andrew’s relationships and state of mind are made up out of whole cloth, and he navigates a delicate balance of fact and fiction throughout. 

His portrayal of Andrew is perhaps more thoughtful than the man himself truly deserves, as Sheen presents the disgraced royal as almost laughably out of touch and fully oblivious in the way that only the very rich and extremely well-connected can ever really manage. Having never faced anything like consequences or accountability for his actions, Sheen’s Andrew often seems genuinely startled to discover that he could, and even his most delusional statements—such as claiming he can’t sweat or that there’s no way he could be expected to remember every woman he’s been with, sexually speaking—are made with the sort of absolute belief that only comes from spending an entire life never once being told you’re wrong. 

It’s a performance that is often difficult to watch for all the right reasons, if only because Sheen makes it so easy to see how this self-involved, self-interested man has sailed through life considering nothing but his own desires and never, ever paying for the consequences of his choices. He finds genuine bits of humanity in Andrew’s relationship with his daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, as well as his obsessive insecurity about his place within the hierarchy of the royal family. It’s not a sympathetic portrayal, by any stretch, but it is a surprisingly layered one. 

Where Scoop often comes across as cheerleading for the practice of journalism in general and as it’s practiced at the BBC specifically, A Very Royal Scandal opts for a more thoughtful approach, asking what, if any, good this interview actually did. Though his public life and image were demolished, Andrew has still not admitted any sort of guilt or faced legal consequences (and likely never will). Newsnight was widely praised and audiences worldwide certainly tuned in, gleefully unpacking the salacious nature of the interview’s subject matter. But did this conversation do anything in terms of helping real victims get justice? Is it enough to know, with some level of certainty, that Andrew is at least a fairly terrible person if not an outright criminal? To have witnessed the British monarchy cut checks to make the media circus of it all go away? Perhaps the true scandal of it all, is that so little has changed in its wake.

A Very Royal Scandal premieres September 19th on Prime Video. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV