‘A Very Royal Scandal’ Is a Juicy British Drama

“A Very Royal Scandal,” available now on Amazon Prime Video, tells — retells — the story of when the BBC journalist Emily Maitlis interviewed Prince Andrew on television in 2019 about his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. The very first thing he says in the interview is that “there is no good time to talk about Mr. Epstein and all things associated.” Welp …

The mini-series is tightly focused — its three episodes cover the period just before the interview, the interview itself and the immediate aftermath, with a few key flashbacks — but the show exists in a hall of mirrors of real-world scandals and media. “Royal” lives in the shadow of the crown, and in the shadow of “The Crown,” and is part of a prestige-laundering industry that refashions tabloid ignominy and wretchedness into cool-toned, highbrow drama. And it follows the movie “Scoop,” starring Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell, which premiered in April and is about the same interview.

Michael Sheen stars as Prince Andrew, depicted here as stuffy and frustrated, unappreciated by his brother and devoted to his mother, neither of whom we see. His daughters adore him, as does his ex-wife, but he insists that the happiest time in his life was fighting in the Falklands War. Royal staffers whisper that he is so insulated from the world that he’s incapable of understanding it.

Ruth Wilson plays Maitlis (herself an executive producer of the mini-series), a harried mom devoted to Velcro rollers and late night Google sessions. Wilson drops her voice to more closely resemble Maitlis’s, but it’s so unconvincing that it makes the fictionalized Maitlis seem phony, as if she were stealing a move from the Elizabeth Holmes playbook.

The show plays out as a slow-motion car crash, a what-not-to-do case study for media relations — or perhaps a what-to-do guide for interviewing the terminally hubristic. Anyone who watches the full interview could rightly wonder, “How could you be so stupid to sit for an interview like this and say things like that?” “Royal” does a thorough, energetic, juicy-but-serious job of answering.

And yet, the show can’t escape its own admission that there are much bigger questions one could ask about rape, misogyny, money, secrecy and power. Maitlis has a pat monologue about the injustice of it all, but the call is coming from inside the mini-series.