Amazon’s ‘A Very British Scandal’: TV Review

Written by Russell T. Davies and directed by Stephen Frears, Amazon’s A Very English Scandal was one of the best shows of 2018, a three-hour slice of forgotten (or never-known) history that walked a tricky line between being very sad and very funny. The chronicle of the Thorpe affair, a doomed gay love story at a cultural moment when England very much wasn’t ready to deal with such things, gave Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw room for career-best performances, which is saying a lot.

A few years later, the same production studio but a completely different creative team — writer Sarah Phelps and director Anne Sewitsky — have continued an unlikely franchise with A Very British Scandal. As with the first series, it’s easy to gauge the contemporary resonance that inspired this story and, once again, it’s a splendid showcase for its two stars, Claire Foy and Paul Bettany.

What’s lacking in this tale of sexual double standards and the inconsistent insulation of the British class system is a comparable tonal balance to the first season. A Very British Scandal is mostly just sad and glum, reflective of a decision not to overly sensationalize its tabloid-friendly tale. There’s a lot to admire in that, while at the same time feeling like A Very British Scandal drags a bit — which, at three hours, it shouldn’t.

A Very British Scandal focuses on the Argyll v. Argyll divorce case, which was kibble for the British press in 1963. Margaret Sweeny (Foy) was a society page legend, famous for high-profile affairs and a strange elevator shaft injury that nearly killed her (the fall from a great height is treated here as a very, very obvious metaphor). Ian Campbell (Bettany) was a war hero and, thanks to convoluted inheritance rules, the ascending Duke of Argyll and heir to a ramshackle castle in Scotland. Both married to other people when they met, Margaret and Ian fell in love. He had a title and an estate, but no money. She had money, but she needed legitimacy.

It would have been a great union, except that he was a cash-starved alcoholic and a drug addict, psychologically scarred by his time in a Nazi POW camp, and she was pathologically unfaithful and driven to take extreme steps to protect her position. The resulting divorce case became a global obsession — or so the series wants to suggest, though American audiences are likely to feel their history classes skipped this chapter — and featured accusations of infidelity, forgery, abuse and naughty Polaroids.

That last element — pictures of Margaret wearing only pearls while fellating a headless man — frames A Very British Scandal as almost a 1960s version of Pam & Tommy, an examination of the ways new technology was erasing traditional notions of privacy and blurring boundaries between public and private in a way the culture and law weren’t prepared to handle. As in Pam & Tommy, the “crimes” depicted here penalize women disproportionately. And while we might look at the snazzy ’40s and ’50s cars and stylish period costumes and think, “Isn’t it great that we’ve left hypocrisy in the past,” it takes very little to realize that female sexuality and male sexuality still aren’t treated the same in 2022, and that layers of British aristocracy are still protecting horrible abuses of power.

One can easily imagine a version of this story in which Phelps’ central point was that Margaret was a modern woman penalized for living in the wrong era, to position her greatest sin as “enjoying sex.” That version might be the slightly lighter version, with a greater resemblance to A Very English Scandal.

Phelps’ sympathy is unquestionably with Margaret. Ian is a grotesque, abusive leach. He doesn’t quite batter Margaret’s beloved black poodle, but he’s definitely mean to it, and when he makes fun of Margaret’s stammer — a trait the show thinks is really important for maybe an hour and then forgets completely — you know he’s total garbage. Margaret, though, is also capable of extreme cruelty and a general lack of empathy, especially when it comes to Ian’s ex-wives Louise (Sophia Myles) and Janet (Sophie Ward).

They’re both generally venal people and a couple of scenes midway through verge on a War of the Roses — the Danny DeVito-directed feature, not the 15th-century British thing — sort of dark comedy, especially as they unfold in the dingy and dank hallways of Ian’s Inverary Castle (playing itself in some on-location scenes). More frequently, though, Phelps and Sewitsky aim for glum, often evocative misery. This could have been a story about rich people behaving badly or one fixated on the various high-profile figures Margaret was alleged to have canoodled with, but the focus is on two lonely people, each with shades of awfulness, who generated more awfulness when put together.

Foy, doubtlessly capitalizing on associations with her Emmy-winning turn from The Crown without making the characters even vaguely similar, joins Phelps and Sewitsky in rendering Margaret easy to empathize with, while never letting her off the hook. You can recognize the elements that make her a woman living in the wrong era without ever losing track of the ways that her manipulations wouldn’t play as pure in any era. Bettany is a withering marvel, steering into Ian’s most damaged and damaging sides, without giving in to the devilishly appealing quality of his boozy boorishness in a way that somebody like Peter O’Toole might have back in the day.

The performances and the series might have benefitted from more time covering the earliest stages of the relationship, featured here in maybe two or three scenes of nicely quippy Old Hollywood banter. It’s easier to buy their hatred than their alleged love.

The series boasts solid supporting work from Myles, Camilla Rutherford and particularly Julia Davis as Margaret’s venomous bestie, simultaneously the embodiment of elitist gatekeeping and the old cliche, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

A Very British Scandal doesn’t really feel like a companion piece to the earlier Amazon title; it’s a tenuous brand that’s been further confused by the recent premiere of Netflix’s comically bad, narratively similar Anatomy of a Scandal. It isn’t as pleasurable as A Very English Scandal, nor does it cut as deep, even if Bettany and Foy are entirely worth watching and some of the modern echoes hit home.