Though richly imagined, with a strong cast of British TV and film mainstays (the cast includes Colm Meaney, Ruby Bentall and Raza Jeffrey), The Serpent Queen absolutely lives and dies (and there’s gory deaths galore) on Samantha Morton’s sardonic, softly spoken and charismatic Goth Queen. As Catherine de Medici, she can be forgiven for uttering a clanging cliché here – we believe it really is good to be bad – as she invests her character with the right amount of gleeful wickedness to go with her ambition, without veering into camp. That said, a little camp wouldn’t be entirely out of place here.
Serpent Queen now on Starz
In this Starz Original, new to Prime, Morton plays the real-life matriarch of a notorious Renaissance crime family, who went on to become queen of France and whose family legacy also includes important patronage of the arts, based on an account of her life by bestselling biographer Leonie Frieda.
Teasers suggest the source material hardly matters: The Serpent Queen seems as loose a version of history as the superlative, silly and often surreal TV perspective on another famous Catherine: The Great. The series spend little time on Catherine’s political achievements as Queen, more on her the breathtakingly cruel punishments doled out to her enemies and the dreary, inevitable implication that Catherine, as a Nasty Woman of history, dabbled in the occult.
The serpent of the title appears as metaphor for absolute power corrupting and as Catherine’s creeping familiar. It’s depicted on screen as a literal snake lurking in her skirts, the image throwing a bit of vaguely Freudian horror at a woman with agency into the mix. The Serpent Queen’s humour is rather more deadpan, in trailers showing Catherine’s drive for power stems from being overlooked and betrayed by almost everyone in her life: demonstrating that for women of her time and per the series tagline, life is often brutal and fear is more reliable than love.
Per Disney’s visually striking Cruella, or Promising Young Woman: chic female baddies remain welcome, though the lack of diversity and a tiresome need to soften them with a tragic past rather dilutes any side-swipes made at misogyny, or any points made on the lot of challenging women in our culture. It’s suggested that her sad, banal backstory doesn’t quite explain Catherine’s enjoyment of her role, here’s hoping the Serpent Queen explores this with a little more originality. Like all the best villains though, Catherine’s acts are increasingly heinous and terrifying, she makes despotism look like great fun and hugely stylish.
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