The Week in Fall TV: Reign Gives Mary, Queen of Scots the Gossip Girl Treatment

Image credit: The CW

There’s only one new show premiering on television this week — but it’s a doozy. The CW’s Reign (Thursday, 9pm) takes a piece of real life history and turns it into something that is so wonderfully, cynically constructed to appeal to the target audience that you almost have to applaud by the shamelessness of the entire enterprise.

The story of Reign is, technically, the sixteenth century story of Mary Stuart, better known to the world as Mary, Queen of Scots. I say “technically,” because Reign is far less an honest version of history than a version that takes as much inspiration from Gossip Girl, George R.R. Martin and Team Edward tribalism as from actual events. Sure, when Mary was a teen she was indeed sent to French to marry the French Prince Francis, as the pilot explains — but, in reality, Francis was a sickly kid who died soon after claiming the throne, unlike the televisual hunk with the equally swoon-worthy half-brother who didn’t actually exist in the real world.

That Reign plays fast-and-loose with history is hardly surprising — it is a CW show aimed at a teen audience, after all. But what’s more impressive is the way in which the series manages to successfully bring the social dynamics of contemporary teen dramas to the fictional sixteenth century and remake itself with a cleaned-up, broadcast-friendly Game of Thrones aesthetic and confused love triangle straight from Twilight seeming like an uneven patchwork of influences.

Make no mistake; Reign is something that will definitely appeal to its core audience, and doubtless many others, as well. It’s a slickly-made, fast-moving piece of television that lacks the self-consciousness of the CW’s Arrow, say, or the jokiness of Supernatural or Smallville. It definitely commits to the bit; the only problem being that there will doubtless be those who don’t realize that the actual history behind the gloss was far more interesting, tragic and, ultimately, more worthy of a television show than the version onscreen.

Elsewhere this week: For those who enjoy the watchable procedural fluff of the USA network, this is a great week — both White Collar and Covert Affairs return on Thursday (9pm and 10pm, respectively). Beautiful people making dull quips while solving impossible problems in an hour has rarely been such fun.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661469/s/3274686b/sc/38/l/0L0Swired0N0Cunderwire0C20A130C10A0Cthe0Eweek0Ein0Efall0Etv0Egame0Eof0Ethrones0Egossip0Egirl0Ereign0C/story01.htm
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