While the general public got shushed by Lorde, Netflix changed its payment plan. It also brought us Anatomy of a Scandal, a hugely successful Sienna Miller/Rupert Friend courtroom drama pivoting on the murky nuances of sexual consent. Though the core of the series deals with a very serious issue, I’m still trying to work out why it’s been so captivating. Why is this particular cluster of one-hour episodes topping the Netflix charts?
Perhaps it’s Sienna Miller herself? Her hair is a melted halo. (That’s a good thing.) Her skin is flawless in a naturally dewy – rather than powdery or filter-y – way. And the initial scandal eerily echoes Sienna’s own post-bohemian It-girl rough patch. (Her former partner was revealed to be having an affair with their nanny.) Sienna’s lived through the myriad feels that come from public-domain humiliation, and we can feel that as she plays a woman trying to keep her shit together in front of the braying paparazzi.
Perhaps it’s simply the money that makes the show pop? I’m the first to admit that my favourite genre is extremely rich people in extremely rich houses being somewhat dastardly. Rich women with a lot of feelings are crack to me, as they navigate being both liberated and held captive by their money. The things these women sacrifice! The biting of their tongues! The forest-y decals in their kitchens! Extreme wealth is always captivating, if only by way of having live-in staff and more Max Mara coats than you could wear in a lifetime.
Perhaps it’s all the power? Rupert Friend is compartmentally hot – all the pieces are there for heat – but the temperature runs in the minuses. There’s simply nothing less sexy than a Tory MP, especially one who’s so particular about which women he treats with respect, and which ones he disdains. His sense of his own familial legacy is frankly revolting; the idea that family cannot fail, even at the expense of truth, perversely prevails. It’s hard to look away from his Machiavellian power plays. And needless to say, Friend’s achingly Tory haircut – somehow too square and too soft, chiseled from a sad putty of inexhaustible entitlement – stamps out any last embers of desire.
Or perhaps it’s the show’s overt Britishness I can’t get enough of? The stately House of Commons canteen. The stiff upper lip-ness. Anatomy is both a frothy and forensic look at dishonour, silly in is rather out-there anti-reality TV effects – Sienna falls through the courtroom like Alice down the rabbit hole; Friend is involved in a rather nasty hit-and-run with an invisible clown car. There’s certainly something slightly excruciating about the rape of a parliamentary intern juxtaposed with camera theatrics. But the show tackles the hard stuff, too; it’s an autopsy of the lives scandal touches as it ripples from the event. (It also takes us back to scandals of yore, and delivers the most farfetched plot twist in modern TV.)
But there’s something distinctly British about the idea of scandal, which I find both endlessly fascinating and unbearably familiar. Something about being a Brit sets one quite deeply in one’s ways and customs. We’re regimentally refined and wholly ridiculous. We’re as exhausting as we are eccentric. We’re nuts and we all sort of agree to bask in it rather than call it out. We’re not like a regular island, we’re a plague island, liberally sewn with toffs and traditions, and any deviation from prescribed British living is the essence of scandal. British dishonour itself is a very specific unraveling of the complex customs of being British; a judgement of the “wrong” actions alongside the nationwide appetite to hear every juicy detail. I guess we feel better about our own messy Britishness when other people fail to nail it? American scandal hits different, I can’t explain why.
Protecting the family name is a luxurious burden of being British – every season of The Crown reinforces this – and that, I think, is why we can’t turn away from Anatomy of a Scandal. It’s simply too delicious when Brits go gonzo.