Writing Lessons From… Mary and George

Mary Villiers (played brilliantly by Julianne Moore) needs to secure her and her children’s futures after discovering her awful husband left her nothing after his death. She rests her main hope on her second son, George, and his beautiful looks.
It’s known that King James I has male lovers, and if George can become one of his favourites, the family will be saved.

First, George must be trained in how to behave in a royal court, and then he must catch the attention of the king. Once he does, he becomes a target for the Earl of Somerset, the king’s current favourite. Thankfully, manipulative Mary helps sort the problem of Somerset by, you know, helping to get him executed.

We follow George and Mary as they rise higher and higher through the ranks, until George speaks through the king and can convince the king to do as he wishes, and as Mary secures the futures of her other children. We follow the story all the way through James’ illness and death, to how George must develop a new relationship with James’ heir and the new king, Charles.

Yeah, that explanation was messy.

I’ve spent quite a while, having finished bingeing the series, trying to work out why it didn’t sit right with me.

Could it be an ending problem again?

The ending is so rushed.

The final episode goes: the king is dead, George’s wife has a baby boy, Charles is crowned, oh now we’re in a pub and somehow George is at war and not doing well, OH! He’s been stabbed. And now he’s dead.

WHAT?!

I know how we got here but how did we get here? How did George get sent away to fight a war? One moment Princes Charles is saying war might not be a good idea considering England doesn’t have a fleet, they have merchant ships, and not much of an army, and boom! Suddenly we’re at war and George is rubbish and now he’s dead.

Was the structure the problem?

After the first few episodes, each episode springs forward into the future by at least a year.

The series is seven episodes long, which is an odd number. Usually these things are six or eight episodes long, maybe ten. Is there an episode missing? Did they run out of budget and have to make a scrappy, quick ending?

Maybe.

But as I thought on it further, I realised that wasn’t really the problem I had with Mary and George.

Doing research into the historical facts, it’s all there. I can see what the writers were working with. As I do my own research, I find myself falling down rabbit holes of earls and dukes and political alliances until my head is spinning, and I was only doing a quick glance of what really happened.

Ultimately, this is a TV show that doesn’t know what its story is, and that’s why there’s confusion at the end.

Is this the story of George Villiers?
That would make sense. The show starts with his birth and ends with his death. The main plot seems to be about his rise to power, how this kind boy turns into a manipulated and manipulative man corrupted by power.

Or is it the story of Mary Villiers?
This would also make sense. The first scene of episode one is her giving birth to George, and the final scene is her overlooking what’s left of her family after his death. The main plot shows her manipulation, her greed, but also the love she’s capable of, and the horrors.

Of course! I hear you cry. The show is called Mary and George, so of course it’s about both Mary and George.

But then, is it about the manipulation of powerful people? This is a theme that runs throughout the show, using both George and Mary as centre pieces, until the end when we don’t get to see the final cementing of George’s manipulative relationship with the new King Charles.

So maybe it isn’t so much a story about the relationships George has with James and then Charles. Even though that’s also present throughout the show and makes for interesting watching.

On the other hand, there are a lot of bums in this show. A lot of sex. Even when it isn’t called for as the show progresses.

So maybe it’s also about the existence and secrecy of gay relationships in seventeenth century English aristocracy?

Maybe Mary and George is just a dramatic version of what happened within this specific timeframe.

The truth is that, on paper, it can be about all of these things, and, to some extent, it is.

But as far as storytelling goes, it can’t be about ALL of these things. It feels too much. Especially as the series continues and the details become spaced out, things start to feel rushed, suddenly things aren’t making sense.

The writing lesson here is about focus.

It’s not only story details (like why George is where he is when he’s killed) that get left out, it’s also character development. We could have had so much more of specific characters if there had been more focus in the storytelling, and ultimately, that could have made the show more satisfying to watch.

Personally, I would have loved for the focus to be on George’s relationships with James and Charles. The majority of it is already there, and it’s fascinating. Mix it with the theme of manipulation and you have a full story.

How this kind boy is manipulated into the king’s court, and then becomes the manipulator. How, as he realises King James will soon die, he must get Princes Charles on his side, and just how he does that.

That was a great episode. A wonderful example of how manipulated George had become the manipulator. How much he’d learned from his mother and how much he had left to learn.

But also showing how easy both James and Charles were to charm and sway, because they’d been hurt and lost before. George gave them something to cling to at different times in their lives, with very different types of relationships.

Two different types of relationships that George managed to successfully cultivate.

Which butted up against how bad George was at manipulating stronger people around him such as Sir Francis Drake and the Spanish officials…

Ah! See, all the themes are in there, they intertwine with one another, I can completely understand why the creators of this show did what they did.

But that ending.

If they’d ended it on Charles’s coronation. Or at the death of King James…

Or just given it that one last episode, showing George’s growing relationship with the new King Charles, how his personality takes a turn for the worse, how bad he is at war, how Charles gets him involved when he shouldn’t have.

At least then his death would have made more sense.

This is a tricky one to unravel.

There are so many good themes and points being made throughout the show, all with interesting characters.

So what do you do when you have that much good material and only seven episodes?

Then some things need to be cut.

Honestly? I’d have cut out a subplot.

When it comes to historical research, when families were so big, it can be difficult to leave a character out. While the story of George’s older brother, John, had points that drove Mary and George’s stories, John’s story wasn’t told in full and if taken out or mentioned briefly, perhaps it could have left space to give George a more developed ending.

And when I say mentioned briefly, I mean John’s violence and his forced wedding. We needed to see how horrific Mary could be when she thought she was doing the right thing for her child. But we didn’t need the sex scandal caused by John’s wife, the reasoning behind it or her forced abortion.

Horrific, yes, but we already know Mary is capable of horrors, and all this did was develop a story that was never factually completed, taking up space that could have been given to George’s ending.

Sometimes we need to focus down and cut out stuff, even if it’s good.

It’s hard to drill down into something and leave out the rest of what’s good and meaningful, but that also makes for a deeper, better, less rushed story.

And a deeper story is the one that sticks with you, long after the credits have rolled and the hero has been murdered.