'The Royals': Elizabeth Hurley Is the New Kris Jenner
If your idea of a campy good time is to hear the Queen of England say, “It smells of sex in here, dirty sex — apparently someone has been beavering about,” then by all means watch The Royals, which premieres Sunday night on E!. That these words emanate from Elizabeth Hurley playing a jaded, cynical queen probably adds to the camp pleasure some viewers will take from this mostly dreary show.
Conceived by Mark Schwahn, creator of that long-running banality One Tree Hill, The Royals is E!’s first scripted program. The series is about a British dynasty headed up by Hurley’s Queen Helena, her husband, King Simon (Vincent Regan), and various children, cousins, and extended family, none of whom is ever very far from either a drink, a drug, or a snarky insult. Sometimes the insults are even self-directed: “I’m just a bitch with money and power, but I do make it look good,” brags Princess Eleanor (Alexandra Park). In your sodden dreams, honey.
One imagines the often-amusing Hurley got involved in The Royals hoping she’d be leading a nighttime soap in which she could be regally naughty in the manner of Joan Collins’s Alexis Carrington in Dynasty. Oh, if only The Royals was that much fun.
Related: Elizabeth Hurley on Her ‘Royals’ Queen: Princess Diana Was on Our Minds
Instead, Hurley has to gulp down a script, then cough up lines like, “The footman nearly saw my snatch,” and watch helplessly as (later this season) Collins herself comes to The Royals to play the Grand Duchess of Oxford, Helena’s mother. Hurley can’t even preside over her own kingdom as the haughtiest of the queen bees.
In general, you’re supposed to find it gleefully appalling that the royal family would be depicted as a bunch of bed-hopping, drug-taking, amoral twits, but really, at this point in world pop culture, don’t we know that royal families aren’t perfect, and isn’t crass behavior the norm, not the tickling novelty, that The Royals wants us to experience?
The Royals premieres right after the season premiere of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which probably insures a good amount of tune-in from the kind of audience that might find The Royals fun. It also provides the only shocking thing about The Royals, which is that, by comparison, The Kardashians is a witty Restoration comedy.
The Royals has already been renewed for a second season, and Schwahn has said he’s not worried about bad reviews because the audience for this show won’t read reviews. Let’s have our own kind of fun and prove him wrong, shall we?
The Royals airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on E!.
