It starts very well. They give a nice insight into an 18yo girl, totally protected and kept from everything except her family, suddenly dropped into the position of Queen of the most powerful country on the planet. Not unexpected, but completely unprepared. The early episodes are very good. Melbourne and Peel are both very well done and the drama does what it should do, it breathes life into history.
The problems start when Albert appears. Tom Hughes is simply dreadful as Albert, completely unconvincing. Albert was an intense, prickly and stubborn man. Hughes plays him as a sulky toy boy. It is awful. But then Hughes tends to play sulky toy boys so it is hardly a surprise. A better casting would have been Daniel Brühl who played Nikki Lauda in Rush, but there it is. I suspect Hughes was included as eye candy for the ladies, and certainly as a man I found Jenna Coleman very nice to look at, so I don't begrudge them that. The difference is Coleman carried her part well, Hughes was all wrong. By contrast, his brother Earnest is excellent.
It also gets increasingly soapy after Albert arrives on the scene, culminating in a final episode that is little more than an extended advert for the 2nd series. It gets quite bad. It is known that Albert was not that keen on Victoria and accepted her proposal because it was his duty to do so. He fell in love her, very much so, but after they were married. That won't do at all for a soap (it would be OK the other way around), so he has to be besotted from the start. It's hard to see the Prince Albert we are given by Hughes falling in love with anyone except himself, so it's all very false.
