Historical Dramas Are Horny Again — Huzzah!

In Mary & George, the newest co-production from Starz and Sky, there is more than one way to gain power, but everyone seems happiest to choose the hottest option.

Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore) is broke and has no way to support her family or provide good marriages for her children. With her first-born being an irredeemable dolt, she focuses on molding her second-born, the achingly beautiful George (Nicholas Galitzine), into the perfect gentleman for a unique partner: King James VI/I (Tony Curran.) The Scottish monarch has just taken over the English throne, leaving a scramble for control among his many hangers-on and wannabe advisors. He is also, as one bystander acidly notes, "a dead-eyed, horny-handed horror who surrounds himself with many deceitful well-hung beauties." What better way to secure the Villiers family fortune than through the King’s bed?

There’s a quote oft-attributed to Oscar Wilde that declares, "Everything in the world is about sex — except sex. Sex is about power." Whether or not you agree with Wilde on that ethos, it’s proven to be an alluring motivation for centuries’ worth of art. We have plenty of history books that extensively detail how world leaders, ambitious generals, and conniving courtiers used their physical wiles to climb up the social ladder. It all makes for intriguing stuff, particularly if you’re making a period drama and want to shake off any accusations of stuffiness and boredom.

As Hollywood has been saying for decades now, sex sells. Mary & George is but the latest addition to a proud entertainment formula: the red-hot, sex-fueled, nudity-heavy and highly profane historical drama that prizes skin shots over tedious decorum. And we welcome its glorious return to our screens.

The historical drama genre has never been as buttoned-up and wan as its reputation suggests, particularly on television. In the UK, the Roman drama I, Claudius broke new ground when it first aired in 1976 thanks to its, for the time, candid depictions of seduction, violence, and a very rudimentary cesarean section. While adapted from a novel, the series had no qualms about embracing the oft-documented lasciviousness of the Roman Empire. Many viewers rejected it at the time as shameless attention-grabbing, but the series’s legacy long outlived such scorn.

Sex has always found its way into period dramas. The beloved BBC adaptation of Pride & Prejudice may stick to the mores of the Regency era but that didn’t stop Andrew Davies from adding a dripping wet Colin Firth for shameless self-gratification. Yet many examples from the ‘90s erred towards tempting gazes and a hand held for a second too long during a dance. As the so-called Golden Age of TV followed the dominance of cable, where anything goes, sex soon followed, and the 2000s saw a veritable explosion in full-frontal historics.

In Rome, HBO and the BBC's luridly expensive dramatization of the reign of Julius Caesar, f**king was front and center. The goal was to depict the sleaze and scheming of the Roman Empire with no filtering of its grim perversities. No stone was left unturned, whether it was the extreme bloodiness of the battlefield (and Caesar’s assassination) or the love scenes that ranged from tender to aggressive to just a bit mad.

Michael Apted, who directed the first three episodes of the series, would later complain that the British edit of his work had been too focused on sex over the political drama he had prioritized. Certainly, it was tough to avoid criticisms from many skeptical viewers that Rome was shamelessly using its sexual content for a ratings boost. But it worked, right up until Rome was canceled after two seasons due to ballooning costs. By then, the rest of the TV world was scrambling to keep up. Audiences wanted true-life tales from our pasts, but with all of the deviance that they’d come to expect from HBO.

There was The Tudors, which was all about a hot Henry VIII and his many wives and troubles, and proudly soapy in its historically lackadaisical depiction of them. In The Borgias, the power struggles of a notoriously corrupt Pope and his incestuous children were given full reign to titillate viewers over three seasons. In the UK, the entanglements and sexual politics of the English Civil War were explored in the artfully titled The Devil's Whore. Starz adapted several novels by Philippa Gregory for its many sexy historical dramas, like The Spanish Princess and The White Queen. While the former was accused of "wild historical inaccuracy" by critics in Spain, its viewers were happy to accept them in favor of aesthetically lavish melodrama with the smoldering glances to match.

It's worth noting the difference between shows like this and, say, eroticized period dramas like Bridgerton and Outlander, which are explicitly based in fiction and never claimed to document history as it happened. Rome very much did, and the key hook of the shows it inspired was that they were revealing the past as it truly happened. There was plausibility to their claims, after all, or at least some solid reasoning. Henry VIII was a gross horn-dog. The Borgias siblings were rumored to be in an incestuous relationship, although hard evidence for this claim has never been found.

There are shows that bridge this gap between historical fact and soapy fiction. The Great, Tony McNamara's satirical take on the rise of power of Russia's Catherine the Great, is perhaps the best recent example. The Hulu series blended sly humor and proud modernisms with a tumultuous period of history, and, of course, plenty of sexual tension. The end effect, a more caustic Bridgerton that the streaming service described as "anti-historical,” feels like the petulant cousin of The Tudors. Where it failed in pinpoint accuracy, it succeeded in capturing the chaos of its era.

The seemingly never-ending and largely bad-faith social media discourse around sex scenes in film and TV posits the idea that such things are never necessary from a character or plot perspective. Just look at the furor over a brief display of nudity and thrusting in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a moment treated as hardcore pornography by some, even though it was a minute part of a three-hour narrative. If we must argue with this exhausting point of view, then we should note how inextricably tied human sexuality is to both our history and future. People do it for any number of reasons and it’s worth exploring them through art.

In Oppenheimer, those sex scenes were a demonstration of a dedicated scientist’s all-too-human follies and the conflict between desire and duty. In Mary & George, sex is the easiest way to cut through the bullsh*t of politics and pander to primal needs. Want and need are often opposing forces, and all of our intricate calculations and objectivity can crumble in an instant when presented with pure wanton pleasure. To deny how that has played a role in history would be to deny history itself. What, you think Henry VIII’s six marriages were for sport?

Mary & George may jazz up a few details and add a couple of extra orgies to the equation for flavor, but at its passionate heart is truth, in essence, if not literal detail. The Jacobite court was rife with sexual intrigue, paranoia, and treachery that irrevocably changed the face of what is now known as Great Britain. Why not literalize those qualities and explore the basest human instincts that have bound us together for millennia? If there is a common bond between the horny historical drama genre, it’s the bitter realization that humanity never truly changes. Sometimes your crotch is bigger than your brain. Even the mightiest of rulers can be toppled by a bad romance.

Mary & George airs Fridays at 9:00 PM ET on Starz and streams on the Starz app. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Kayleigh Donaldson is a writer of film and pop culture features for Screen Rant and Pajiba. Also seen at SyFy Fangrrls and Bright Wall Dark Room.