Just three days after its premiere, on April 15, Anatomy of a Scandal, the new British limited series, displaced the second season of Bridgerton into number 1 of its global Top 10, reported TV Guide. In a few hours, when the platform updates its ranking data, it will be known how many hours of viewing (it must exceed the 115.75 million Shonda Rhimes period drama) achieved by this adaptation of Sarah Vaughan's bestseller starring Sienna Miller, Rupert Friend and Michelle Dockery .
Since the Profumo case, scandals combining sex and politics have received strong public treatment in the United Kingdom, with the most recent of which are the accusation of sexual assault of a minor by one member of Parliament, the two-year sentence for the rape of another and the hospitalization for excesses of a third party, in addition to the case of Prince Andrew, who made an economic arrangement not to go to trial for the abuse of Virginia Roberts when she was a minor and was managed by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
This sort of collage of judicial proceedings that Vaughan covered over the years tells the story of James Whitehouse (Friend), a British government minister and close friend of the prime minister (Geoffrey Streatfeild), happily married to Sophie (Miller), with whom he has had two children to whom he teaches that “The Whitehouses always! they win!” , as he repeats. But his privileged life begins to fall apart when a newspaper reveals that he has had a five-month affair with his assistant in Parliament, Olivia Lytton (Naomi Scott).
Sophie defends him, convinced that the father of her children is a good man, until Olivia denounces James for rape and begins a trial. Prosecutor Kate Woodcroft (Dockery) then enters the scene, who for some reason does not even blink at the minister's display of power forced to leave office for the duration of the trial.
The development of the prosecution and defense arguments will open cracks in Sophie's convictions, and the series made by former House of Cards showrunner Melisa James Gibson and written by David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies, Ally McBeal), is narrated from her eyes.
Through flashbacks, Anatomy of a Scandal tells how James and Sophie met, when they were both students at Oxford. There, too, the friendship between the parliamentarian and the prime minister was born, where both were members of the exclusive Club of Libertines, a group of wealthy young people who dedicated themselves to celebrity parties, break the peace in restaurants and — as seen in the trial — committing some crimes.
The plot weaves together the past and the present, while fears and doubts grow in Sophie's mind. With subtlety — though not as much as Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You — the six episodes address the meaning of consent in sex; at a time of great intensity, the prosecutor orders the jury to evaluate whether Olivia gave her consent or whether James considered whether she was consenting.
The rest of the themes are the usual ones in first world politics: privilege, the rarefied world of the powerful where justice stops looking at all people with the same impartiality, the difference between appearances and reality. The prosecutor has her own story, which threatens the stability of the prime minister's government as the very identity of this determined woman.
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