This is a television series that I think not many have watched. Though it really was filmed at Versailles and co-produced by a French studio, it’s an English language series with primarily British performers. Its premise is the founding of Versailles itself by King Louis XIV. There are a total of three seasons but we’ve just watched only the second season and I’ve decided to drop it. The first season was quite solid but the second season was just too simple and silly.

The series begins with a newly installed Louis XIV who feels insecure as the nobles challenge the authority of the throne. Tiring of Paris and its intrigues, he retreats to his father’s hunting lodge at Versailles. There he has a dream of constructing a brand new palace from the ground up and establish the court there. By forcing the aristocracy of France to come to him to his place of power, he hopes to assert absolute authority. With the aid of trusted retainers such as his valet Bontemps, his chief of security Fabien Marchal and even his brother Philippe I the Duke of Orléans who remains staunchly even though he is badly treated at times by Louis. The first season introduces all of these major players as Louis starts building Versailles while fending off plots by nobles who want to prevent him from establishing a strong monarchy.

Naturally there’s plenty of soap opera drama as well. In the first season, Louis’ mistress Henrietta of England who is married to his brother. But that’s okay as Philippe is gay and has a long term homosexual lover the Chevalier de Lorraine. The series really was shot both in Versailles and at other castles in France, making it supposedly the most expensive television series ever made there. The decor and costumes are glorious as you may expect and it makes for a quite decent spectacle. Still budget constraints mean that both battles happen all the time, they are mostly talked about and not shown. Also as splendid as Versailles looks, the series does eventually start to feel like it exists in its own tiny world as they never show Paris at all. This does rather fit the theme of the second season as the nobles themselves feel trapped in Versailles against their will but it’s a real limitation as you’re constantly reminded that all this is just fakery.

Unfortunately the second season took a pretty drastic downturn in quality. They lay some groundwork to set up an epic confrontation between Louis XIV and William and Orange but that turns out to be something of a damp squib. Instead the dramatic weight lies mostly on Louis’ current favorite mistress the Marquise de Montespan and the so-called Affair of the Poisons which involved many members of the court poisoning one another amidst accusations of witchcraft. The accompanying Inside Versailles short videos explain that this account is based on real events but it still feels petty to focus on this while French soldiers are fighting campaigns all over Europe. The plotting is also heavy-handed and obvious, with characters prone to do stupid things to keep the story going. The character of Fabien Marchal is meant to be intimidating but as he is unable to keep up with all of the plots going on, he ends up being another perfect example of the Worf Effect.

Perhaps the series’ biggest failing is that while it does give you a taste of what life might have been like in the court of Versailles, it doesn’t even try to educate the audience on the wider socio-political scene. In the second season, we see Philippe being remarried to a princess of the Palatinate to secure an alliance and later we hear that French troops have all but destroyed the Palatinate and we don’t know why. We don’t understand why Louis is able to force all those aristocrats to continue staying at Versailles when they are all clearly unhappy there. One key facet of his rule was to deliberately reduce the power of the nobility was to promote commoners into administrative positions but none of that subtlety or detail shows up in this series. It’s all murders, drama, jealousy and so on. As a spectacle, this series is okay but it’s very terribly shallow and simplistic and that’s why I don’t feel bad about dropping it at all.