A Very Royal Scandal (2024) Review: A Royal’s Fall from Grace

A Very Royal Scandal (2024) wastes solid performances by Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson in a male-centric view of Prince Andrew’s disastrous BBC interview.

In 2019, when Newsnight on BBC came out with an interview in which journalist Emily Maitlis sat down with Prince Andrew, the world was eager to take a peek into the life of one of the senior-most royals. A Very Royal Scandal tells the story of the disastrous fallout of this interview and takes its audience on an introspective look at how his role in the royal family was stripped away from him. 

Written by Jeremy Brock and directed by Julian Jarrold, A Very Royal Scandal is a three-episode mini-series tracking the lead-up, interview and aftermath of Prince Andrew’s (Micheal Sheen, of Good Omens) hour-long BBC interview with Emily Maitlis (Ruth Wilson, of The Woman in the Wall) where he publicly discussed his connection to serial sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Their relationship made headlines in 2019 when Virginia Giuffre came out as a victim of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring; she publicly declared that, in 2001, Prince Andrew had sexually abused her on one of Epstein’s properties. As her statement began to gain traction from the media, Maitlis and her team reached out to Andrew’s reps to arrange a sit-down interview, giving the prince a chance to explain himself in his own words. While initially hesitant, Prince Andrew, much to the behest of the rest of the royal family, agreed to sit down with Maitlis and tell his story. 

What followed was nothing short of a public relations catastrophe for the royal family. Prince Andrew was not only unconvincing but utterly nonsensical, allowing Maitlis to take charge of the interview without the prince understanding the damage he was actively doing to both his and his family’s reputation. 

While A Very Royal Scandal is not a completely unpleasant viewing experience, it is a very frustrating one. The series almost refuses to make a clear, definitive judgment on the aftermath of Maitlis’ interview. Sure, it wants to condemn Prince Andrew, but on more than one occasion it paints him as a victim. Truthfully, the writing shows more sympathy for the negative backlash the disgraced royal has had to deal with than his accuser. 

Andrew is painted as a pitiful man-child who clings to his title as his sole sense of identity and has an unhealthy obsession with the way his image is perceived. The writing will not rule on whether or not Andrew is telling the truth when he says he does not remember Virginia Giuffre, but only makes slight suggestions of guilt or innocence through ignorance. While this may be an attempt to paint Andrew as a complex character, it reads more like we should feel bad for him even though he is a man being accused of having direct involvement with an international child sex trafficking ring. 

The series repeatedly wants you to feel sympathy for not just Prince Andrew, but those around him in his royal sphere too. Only in episode three does the writing begin to acknowledge the voice and hardship the victims of the story have endured. At one point, Prince Andrew’s daughter Princess Beatrice (Honor Swinton Byrne of The Souvenir Part II), in what is meant to be a moment of defiance and choosing her nuclear family over her royal one, says that the negative press surrounding her father and his possible guilt is no longer a problem for her and her husband. In this, she means she refuses to answer for her father’s crimes any longer, which would be a meaningful moment if it were not so tone-deaf to the victims who can’t just declare this no longer an issue for them because they do not want to “deal with it” anymore.

The choice to even include Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie as a whole is a confusing one. I understand the intention behind adding them to the story; here is a man who stands accused of sexually assaulting a female who was only 17 at the time of the alleged incident, but he has two daughters who are not much younger than the accuser herself. The story attempts to depict the conflicting feelings his daughters, primarily Princess Beatrice, have toward their father in the aftermath of his publicly speaking out about the incident. However, the utter lack of dimension given to the girls takes away from any desired impact their inclusion has to the story. Their lack of sympathy for the victims is also simply jarring. The way the girls are written has their feelings about the alleged crimes all revolve around their shattered idea of who their father is rather than the woman who claims she has been hurt by him. 

The glaring issue with A Very Royal Scandal is its omission of a female point of view. There is far too much grace given to Prince Andrew and by the end of the limited series run almost none is given to Maitlis, much less to Virginia Giuffre. By the end of the series, Maitlis is condemned as uncaring and fame-hungry. While she worked to give the interview of her career and is initially depicted as fiery and incapable of taking any bullshit, by the end of the show’s run she retreats into an unsure shell of her former self. The show seems like a fantastic vehicle to show the drive and ambition of a trailblazer in the broadcast journalism realm, but ultimately it ends up asking if Maitlis’ work was worthy of anything that wasn’t self-serving. The series asks the question, was anything accomplished from this interview? However, it refuses to acknowledge the clear answer: yes. 

The series seems to say the interview achieved nothing monumental because it did not lead to the conviction of Prince Andrew in the sexual abuse case brought forward by Giuffre; however, this takes away from the very real achievement that Emily Maitlis and her team at Newsnight accomplished. They were able to show that the royals were not untouchable. For centuries, the royal family has revolved in a different orbit, the series even goes as far as to say they exist in a different reality than common people. This interview was able to bring the royal family into a reality that has very real consequences. While it didn’t lead to a conviction it led to a complete change in public perception of someone thought to be too powerful to fall and therefore a form of validation of a victim’s story.

The overtone of A Very Royal Scandal, ultimately, is a lack of conviction. The potential of the series is never fully actualized due to incomplete motifs and lukewarm stances. There’s an attempted fixation on time with repeated showings of various clocks rapidly counting down, but this motif is used so sparsely that it sometimes feels like the writers have completely forgotten their employment of this as a plot device.

Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson give two knockout performances that are buried under convoluted character development and a refusal to definitely cast a character in an entirely good or entirely bad light which ultimately leaves them in no man’s land rather than paints them as complex beings. While Maitlis was an executive producer on the show, the series could have greatly benefitted from the inclusion of more female collaborators to tell a story that relies so heavily on the power of women using their voices.

A Very Royal Scandal (2024) will be available to watch on Prime Video from September 19, 2024.