Nobody is born with the word Great attached to their name, and The Great, a 2020 period series credited to Tony McNamara, builds its comedy and its drama out of the distance between the title and the starting point.
What is The Great about?
The setting is Russia in the 18th century, and the woman at the centre is Catherine, long before history gave her a grand label. At the outset she is, in the show's own phrase, Catherine the Nothing: married to Peter, the emperor of Russia, and holding no real power of her own at his court. Their marriage is explosive, a running clash of temperaments and intentions, and it sits at the heart of every episode. Around that relationship the series charts her climb, step by step, from an overlooked wife to the ruler the history books remember. It does so while openly refusing to behave like a history lesson. The makers describe it as anti-historical, so events, manners and dialogue are bent freely for the sake of the story and the jokes.
About the cast
Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult are the first two names in the credits, and the ensemble around them includes Phoebe Fox, Sacha Dhawan, Charity Wakefield, Gwilym Lee, Adam Godley and Douglas Hodge. A court story needs a crowded court, and the size of this cast reflects that: allies, rivals and hangers-on all get room. Tony McNamara is the name the catalogue lists against the series.
Context & significance
What sets The Great apart from the usual costume drama is its tone. The catalogue tags it as biography, comedy, drama and historical all at once, and the description that travels with it is genre-bending. Viewers expecting a careful reconstruction of imperial Russia should adjust: the palace, the costumes and the names are real enough, but the series treats the record as raw material, not as a rulebook. That freedom is the point. It lets a story about power, marriage and ambition play as sharp comedy one minute and serious drama the next. Anyone curious about the real Catherine can treat the show as a lively starting point and read the history afterwards. It is a co-production of the United Kingdom and Australia, with episodes of roughly 52 minutes, and it has been received very warmly by audiences. The humour is adult and the court it shows is not a gentle place, so it suits grown-up viewers better than children.
Watching The Great on Ktime
K-Time offers The Great with a Persian dub and also with Persian subtitles. You can read this page without signing in, but playing episodes requires logging in to a K-Time account. K-Time is a Persian-language service for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi interface across its screens.