If we needed proof TV commissioners have become risk-averse, look no further than there being not one but two dramatic adaptations of Prince Andrew's career-ending interview with Emily Maitlis on Newsnight.
This might not be ripe IP in the vein of Marvel or Mattel, but it is based on an interview that most will have seen and been stunned by.
Just months after Scoop arrived on Netflix, A Very Royal Scandal hits Prime Video to tread the same ugly Buckingham Palace carpets. Yet those who were disappointed by that film’s focus on producer Sam McAlister – at the exclusion of what seemed to be the actual story – will find the meat on the bone here is juicier than a journalist’s grumblings over her snobbish colleagues.
This is in part because of the life rights each streamer bought. Amazon got the real scoop, snapping up Emily Maitlis's side of proceedings and bringing her on to exec-produce.
Ruth Wilson spent time with the presenter-turned-podcaster to prepare for donning her military-style jacket. It shows. If the brown contact lenses and voluminous blonde wig weren't enough, she's also got a convincing hold of Maitlis's commanding voice.
Meanwhile, Michael Sheen is no stranger to inhabiting the pores of actual people – let alone those in the whirlpool of a royal scandal. But without much more than a grey hairpiece to transform him into the now-disgraced duke, you could initially mistake the man having staff tie his laces for a haughtier Aziraphale.
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The depiction of both is sure to set tabloid headlines alight and leave viewers curious as to where the line between truth and dramatisation lies.
We first meet Andrew barking at palace staffers. He takes the opportunity to remind everyone he fought in the Falklands, regardless of whether the opportunity presents itself. Meanwhile, Maitlis is often knocking back nighttime vodkas, doomscrolling Google and feeling hard done by at the Beeb.
Some of the beats are eye-popping. Andrew describes his brother, our current sovereign as a "f**king mummy's boy". He receives the news of Jeffrey Epstein's death with the question: "Is this good for me or bad?". He has sobering flashbacks to Tramp nightclub.
This is where A Very Royal Scandal excels, because it boldly goes there. The drama kicks off with your standard disclaimer about scenes being fictionalised. This bit of legalese is doing clear heavy lifting. The conversations behind closed doors between Andrew and his people – who he's a perpetual bore to – are compulsively watchable.
The three episodes track the back-and-forth to secure the interview, the 50 minutes of forensic questioning itself and then the fallout over several years.
The result is that the show jumps all over the place, particularly so in the third episode, as we speed through Covid and Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit. The months and then years accrue while Maitlis and Andrew's paths entirely diverge. It feels like the show might not have known when to roll the final credits.
The high point is everything to do with the interview. The questions are practiced in-house – so we see how Newsnight expected the media-trained Andrew to answer – then played out and chopped up. It offers insight into how the BBC team put the thing together and what they thought before it went out.
The infamous lines – Pizza Express in Woking, "I don’t sweat" – are siphoned off into a section Prince Andrew describes as his "alibis", as if they might help him. The Newsnight team is shown debating whether to even include them.
Netflix might have reigned for years dramatising the troubled lives of the royals with The Crown, but when it comes to the Prince Andrew problem, Amazon has eaten their lunch. They also, unlike Andrew, remember to bring attention back to Epstein’s victims.
A Very Royal Scandal might take some liberties that royal-watchers will balk at, but as a piece of television it does what it says, because the episodes certainly capture the scandal of the moment.
A Very Royal Scandal is available on Prime Video from Thursday 19 September.
Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
