Knowing there wasn't going to be a fourth series I stuck with Versailles through to its conclusion just to see how it would end though had it gone on to another series I'd have given up after Series Two. Mock spoiler alert, it ends not with a bang but with a whimper as though its makers gave up and went through the motions like a team that knows its beaten and is just waiting for the final whistle.
Versailles covers a roughly 20 year period of Louis XIV's reign but the actors don't age. Not a grey hair in sight. The acting is of a good-to-high standard, particularly given the level of some dialogue.
The quality deteriorates as the series progresses - or perhaps I should say regresses. At least early on there were sexual shenanigans to distract the viewer.
Not surprisingly the writers opt for the more sensational stories relating to the period such as that of the pious queen allegedly giving birth to a black baby by a court dwarf. Needless to say we get The Man in Iron Mask. Now there was a real life man in a velvet mask, though there's no evidence of him interacting with the royal family. But since we don't know for certain who he was, why he was imprisoned, and why he was masked the writers were free to come up with their own story about him. It's just a pity they didn't come up with a more credible or at least an entertaining one.
History goes out the window. The queen died of natural causes, she wasn't murdered. The man in the velvet mask died in prison of natural causes long after the events portrayed. In the series Colbert opposes the revocation of The Edict of Nantes. In fact he was long dead when the Edict was revoked. A totally fictitious back story is invented for the devout Madame de Maintenon as a prostitute but her interesting mixed Protestant-Catholic upbringing was ignored.
For me the nadir was reached in the penultimate episode in an exchange between Louis and Bossuet. When Louis says it was man who based the church in Rome Bossuet replies, "Saint Paul himself..."! You'd think the man the Catholic Encyclopedia considered as perhaps the greatest pulpit preacher of all time might know the line, "you are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church."
For me these inaccuracies wouldn't grate so much if there were good storylines. I enjoy Vikings even though its historical elements are greatly compressed in time. It has credible narratives and, while Versailles had some storylines to begin with, by the end the writers having abandon history seemed to run out of interesting plots.
Review of Versailles
