The Serpent Queen (2022 – 2024)

In spite of superficially, being a tale about 16th century Italian noblewoman Catherine de' Medici, who eventually became a French Queen, looking at this production you might be forgiven for thinking you were at watching a polished historical larper's party, in 21st century woke England. There's nothing terribly Italian about this series. Its vibe is very Brit down to its boots and sadly, this tends to undermine the presentation of what is supposed to be an Italian historical drama. Its cause is further weakened by the predictable and tiresome revisionist perspective, it adopts, laden down with historically inaccurate woke twaddle. Making Catherine out to be an "empowered woman" in the modern feminist idiom, facing down the patriarchy, fails to acknowledge who she was and that, essentially, was a ruthless noblewoman and ruler. Anyone wanting to shed woke crocodile tears for poor oppressed Catherine, need only read some of her rather terrifying and chilling letters. All of this is a shame and rather wasteful, in my view, given the quality casting and high production values. In summary, blindly revisionist nonsense, any half decent historian would write off for the historical fiction, it truly represents.