Ah, here it is, the main event. The second episode of A Very Royal Scandal dedicates itself to the days, hours, and minutes before, during, and after Prince Andrew’s disastrous Newsnight interview, laying out exactly how it ever came to be and how it was allowed to go so terribly. It’s an often frenetic piece of TV, though its suspense is undercut by its reality.
Obviously, the interview went ahead in real life, so when the prospect of its cancellation arises early in the episode, we know it won’t stick. More broadly, we know how the events of the episode played out for the most part in real life because it’s a matter of recent record. The result is that it all feels a little lack of stakes.
This is another reason why it feels a bit of a fool’s errand to adapt a story that is so fresh in the public memory. Sure, there are nuggets of curtain-lifting intrigue in how the episode colors in the moments surrounding Andrew’s fateful exposé. And Sheen’s performance continues to be enjoyable, not least when Andrew whines like a petulant school child that he deserves better treatment than this — he was in the Falklands , don’t you know!? But the majority of this episode evoked a similar feeling in me that I had when watching Scoop : I’m not sure what the point is of meticulously re-creating an interview that is widely available to watch online, aside from it being a somewhat indulgent exercise in re-creation.
And sure, the series has a transformative quality that .