We’re happily in the middle of the second season of The Great, a show I idly started watching as something to do while folding laundry and have become completely enchanted by. For those unfamiliar, it’s a blood-and-sex-soaked comedy about Catherine the Great and her husband Peter, and it’s brilliantly written and acted and almost completely historically inaccurate.
And I was wondering: is it well-known in Russia? Do Russians tend to hate it, or love it, or both? Does anyone know? It’s almost impossible to Google this question.
My Google Fu also failed me. I tried to find a mention of it on RT, but no go.
Then I thought to check whether Hulu is even available in Russia. Turns out it’s not available outside the U.S. at all - you have use a VPN. Since The Great is a Hulu exclusive, its viewership there is probably limited.
The one thing that annoys me about The Great, and this is probably a Scandinavian thing, is that while it is super ahistorical, most of the main characters have their counterparts in history and the events have a sprinkling of history to them, and then they just invent some Swedish royals and a republican revolution out of whole cloth!