The Palace

"The Palace" looks like one of those American post-adolescent dramas where beautiful young 20-somethings are scheming and screwing at every opportunity. Even the role of the queen, recently widowed, seems to have been written for Joan Collins.

Cheap, tawdry, and ridiculous though it is it makes amusing fluff, a pleasant diversion. If you want to laugh at young actors struggling a little too hard to look like they're taking themselves seriously and roll your eyes at the absurdity this could be a lot of fun. In fact, one has to wonder how much the creative staff for this silliness just saw the whole thing as a spoof. If anyone meant this show to be taken seriously it's an epic fail, but as a take-off on American dramas, it's really quite funny.

A really enjoyable piece of British drama. Something you would expect from the BBC but this is produced by ITV. A great look at the fictional monarchy that this world has created. Mixing in real footage with the fictional story you can quite easy believe the characters are living in Buckingham Palace. Can't fault the acting, writing or the cinematography, all brilliant! Rupert Evans especially performs wonderfully as King Richard with the character development of the young man being slightly reckless with his life and then being thrust into the responsibility of being King. Rupert Evans takes the character in his stride and the audience grows along with him. Thoroughly enjoyable, entertaining and heartfelt. Can't wait for Series 2!

I caught this, a couple of nights ago, and I thought it was great fun. It is kitsch, fluffy and seemingly unrealistic: just what you need after a hard day. There is the young King, who is basically a nice guy trying to do the right thing (but is a duck out of water really). There is the party hard brother, who is a scream; the pantomine villain older sister, who is determined to usurp little bro; and the gin swilling mother. That's just the family, the staff are even more bonkers, from the maids, to the king's assistant, who is supposedly colluding with a journalist to write a 'tell all book'; but you can tell she is developing one hell of a soft spot for HM. This is just good fluffy fun: you can see where the plot is going, but I didn't care because it was perfect glitzy escapism.

I've read all of the other seven reviews of this series. Most of the reviewers stated that they were living in Britain and the ones that didn't all seemed to know something about the channel that aired the show. There is also several comparisons to a show from here called 'The West Wing'. Also, all of the reviews were written from January through March of 2008 which is, it seems, when the series was first aired on the ITV channel.

I have never seen 'The West Wing' and I have no idea what ITV or channel 4 is all about and that's fine because none of that has any bearing on 'The Palace'.

This show stands on its own as a good, high quality series centered around a fictional royal family and the internal strive and back-biting that begins to take place after the death of the king, which starts the series and everything gets rolling from there.

This is a enjoyable little eight episode series and I wish it had gone on longer; I don't think that one can say anything better about serial entertainment; can you?

There is an underlying moral theme of doing the right thing vs doing the wrong (Royal) thing and covering this up to protect the Royal family throughout the series.

The complexities of relationships that a Royal Family holds with the public, politicians, the church, their staff and each other were well portrayed and mostly believable in each episode.

For the most part, the actors casted fit their roles quite well, with a few exceptions. The youngest Royal, Princess Isabel, age 17-18 in the series, played by Nathalie Lunghi, (age 22 in 2008), was made to look like a burnt-out '30-something' year old meth addict. Quite over-done in the makeup and over-acted scenes she had to do.

The same with several of the minor actors who played kitchen and wait and cleaning staff. Their scenes were so overacted they made themselves look like blubbering idiots who would NEVER be hired to work in a position requiring discipline, decorum and discretion such as working for a Royal Family. Very UN-Believable portrayals.

I blame this full on the Director, not the actors. They were just doing their jobs, as directed.

Overall, This was an 'easy to binge watch' 8 sessions series to escape from my little life's realities for a day and I learned a bit more about how and why things are done the way they are in the United Kingdom from medieval times throughout today.