OK, we gave it a try. End of Season 1, and end of the series for us.
As mentioned earlier, the music is just all wrong for the period.
But, in totality, this is nothing more than a teenie-bopper, handsome prince, soap opera with some swordplay mixed in.
Over and out,
ND2
I couldn't watch it at all. This show is one big turn-off for me, for several reasons:
1 - Mary, Queen of Scots, was a tall, semi-attractive redhead, who looked a lot like Elizabeth I, due to them being cousins. Who do they pick to play her? A tiny, swarthy, Hispanic chick with black hair who does a terrible accent that's not even French! "I'm the Queen of Frooooonce!" Give me a break! She looked better off playing one of Catherine de Medici's Italian attendants in the background. Speaking of which, they had a thin blond woman playing Catherine, when in fact, the real Catherine was an overweight, scheming brunette. And her French royal husband was not bald!
2 - They run around in 2010s dresses the costume dept. apparently borrowed from every known bridal/prom dress shop in the L.A. area; clothes that would have been considered "underwear" in the 1560s, particularly with all the bare arms shown off. Half the time, her four ladies-in-waiting are dressed like they're going to a Coachella festival, complete with Indian forehead jewelry! Yuck! Not to mention all the women under 30 were running around with their hair long and undone, which was considered trashy and unkempt in that time period. Most respectable French Ladies wore their hair done up in neat, elaborate styles with a little fancy cap on. One thing they snarked about at Frock Flicks was that these actresses apparently had never worn long dresses in their lives (probably ran around most of the time with short-shorts to show off their lower butt-cheeks to the guys in town) and kept hiking up their skirts everywhere they went! A proper woman from any time period who was walking up stairs or stepping over something, did not hike up her skirts to her chest. That was considered very unladylike, and most of the time, she would just kick out the skirt in front of her, or carefully lift it so she wouldn't step on it going up the stairs. Instead, these idiot actresses grab the skirt up in a big wad in front of them any time they're going a long way, stepping over any obstacle, and going up the stairs. Who the hell was their acting coach?!
3 - In real life, the young Queen had four Scottish Ladies-in-Waiting, all named "Mary" like her. They were roughly the same age as her, grew up with her, and were her closest childhood friends. She called them her "Four-Leafed Clover," and affectionately thought of them as lucky. What do we get in this show? Four young ladies the star's age, with the world's stupidest names. Who the hell names a girl "Lola" pre-1960s?! I ask you!
4 - The biggest thing that determined me never watching this show, was hearing about what happened in the pilot. They actually have these 5 girls watch another royal couple on their wedding night, have sex in a room with spy holes in the wall, and then the girls suddenly decide to go off and masturbate. One of the ladies-in-waiting isn't doing it right in the stairwell, and the [bald] king just happens to come along to "help" the little lady out.
That entire thing is disgusting on a lot of levels. This is supposed to be a tv show for high school girls! Not 30-year-olds who have seen it all! The real French Court would have never allowed virgin female nobles and a royal to see such vulgar stuff, nor would these girls have known anything about female masturbation. And for a full-grown man to come along and "help" a young maiden in the stairwell like that? Who the hell wrote this script?!
More reasons to not watch...lol. Thanks for validating!
shareOne last thing: my brother was also a good test subject, and he wasn't even aware of it at the time. See, he sometimes test-watches stuff on Netflix or tv in general to see if it's any good; stuff I won't bother with because I read ahead about it. Now my brother doesn't know anything about Queen Mary, that particular part of Stuart History, or even most of Renaissance history. He's also not a historical costume expert. I think what drew him most to "Reign" (for whatever short time he watched it) was the sword-fighting, which is what draws him to any show about historical fiction.
So without knowing any of that, my brother went in and watched some of it, and even he said it was really bad. He said the writing and the acting for the show was bad, bad enough that he didn't want to watch it after a brief time. He told me about that later when I was complaining about the show at the dinner table, and I realized he was a good source for how people who didn't know anything about history would view the show.
Well yeah.
shareYeah, we stuck it out for a second season, but it did not get much better and we're stopping now also. The only brighter spot was Rose Williams as Princess Claude. The rest was rather boring most of the time.
I think that instead of REIGN, the show title should have been STUPID DECISIONS since every episode someone makes one and then they all have to spend the next several episodes cleaning up the situation that develops from it.