The Great is high quality television. The first few episodes are gold and then it descends into monotony and transparent attempts at cleverness. You stop watching the characters and you are instead watching projections of 21st Century writers. Plus, after the first few episodes it seems to be nothing but a tease and denial, tease and denial, on one main expectation. The acting is quite good because you cannot blame the actors for some of the putrid dialogue. The sets, costumes and cinematography is Emmy worthy, even Oscar worthy. The story seems like it could be fascinating. But here are the problems, the vulgarity and the wokeness. I wish I could curse here but I cannot. Now keep in mind I love cursing and I love vulgarity, I curse a lot myself. But here they use the F word so frequently that is is bizarre. You could lock Joe Pesce in a closet and set it on fire and you would not hear the F word as much as you do in this show,. You hear it literally every 30 seconds in every episode. It is beyond forced. Then there are the unceasing references to copulation, oral sex, body fluids and all that juvenile stuff, in the most extreme and graphic ways and endlessly. It is not edgy nor funny, it's strange. Nothing can have it's intended intent when done so repeatedly. Then we get to the characters of color. I am not anti-woke. In fact this whole show is based on the power of women, and it is, or should be, a fascinating story in that regard. But this is 18th century Russia and, no exaggeration, 40% of the characters/actors, both in speaking roles and background, are people of color. Yeah, sure, you could say to me oh they could be from this region or that, but 40%!!. It is beyond distracting. Why abandon accuracy to make the show look like every tv commercial we see nowadays, they even have bi-racial children running around, you have to get those in there. It is just bizarre and completely takes you out of the story. When almost every week we see a new story of a white male actor apologizing for playing or voicing a character of color 20 years ago, we have scores of roles here which should be white people, but no, its 2021 and everything is woke. It is beyond absurd. Big missed opportunity here, this could have been as good as Queens Gambit but instead you get an amateurish mess.
