The Great Season 2 is as lush and excessive as Season 1

Vulture

"The Great is a show perpetually hanging on a precipice of its own making, although it’s astoundingly good at hiding how hard it works to keep its balance," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "Even more than in the first season, Hulu’s 'occasionally true' drama about the Russian monarch is contained within a fairly small world, with almost all of its action happening inside the palace where Catherine (Elle Fanning) has seized power from her husband Peter (Nicholas Hoult). So it doesn’t feel like a show stretched thin across a sprawling map, and it’s also blessedly free from timeline hopping, currently the most obnoxious trend in streaming drama. Season two is just as lush as the first season, though — the wigs tower high and the only expanses consistently left bare of silk and fur are the bosoms, which heave regularly. There’s excess, excess everywhere, and it’s incredible that something so flowery and deliberately overwrought could also feel almost fragile. But that is the magic of The Great, a show that jokes and f*cks and lops people’s heads off incessantly while simultaneously performing painstaking, subtle emotional calculus."

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• Season 2 of The Great thrives as a dark romcom with grave consequences: "Peter and Catherine are polar opposites, but the once vicious ruler is determined to change for his wife and soon-to-be-born infant," says Saloni Gajjar. "Hoult delicately treads the line between utterly loathsome, stupid, and charming; he doesn’t get to be as boisterous as he was in the first season, but even his relatively subdued performance here is infinitely enjoyable. The arrival of Catherine’s mother, Joanna (Gillian Anderson), crucially shakes up the dynamic between the married couple. Turns out, Peter isn’t the only one with mommy issues. Anderson aces her latest imperious role; she is just as lavish and wild as the show as a whole. The first half of the season does demand patience—each of the first five episodes is an hour long, laying the foundation for the drama to unfold."
• Season 2 is the same impeccably sharp blend of power, pleasure and pain: Season 2 "has an even more claustrophobic feel than its first," says Steve Greene. "That’s not nothing considering the series starts with Catherine plopped in a strange new aristocratic ecosystem where she’s brought to be little more than a breeder of heirs. But following a successful coup against Peter initiated in the waning moments of the first season’s finale, Catherine has taken her place at the top of the Russian food chain. Now the hard part starts."
• The Great creator Tony McNamara says Catherine and Peter's relationship has evolved into a "strange friendship": “They’re a couple, but they’ve got this kid together, but she’s also made him her prisoner, and he seems to have a lot of power for a guy who’s a prisoner," he says. "That just leaves them in a complex dynamic that gets more complicated as the season goes on.”
• McNamara credits Hulu with allowing him to make a no-holds-barred romp that's occasionally true but always, above all, entertaining: "Hulu let me make it extreme where I want it to be extreme, and they've got my back in terms of whatever I want to do. That is a great feeling," he says, adding with a laugh: "I can't think of anything we wouldn't do, because I'm quite contrary. If I thought of something we shouldn't do, it'd probably make me want to do it."
• Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult recall their reaction to Gillian Anderson joining The Great cast: Fanning says that when McNamara first told Anderson about her character's most outrageous scene, the actress didn't even bat an eye. "She was like, 'Okay, I'm in.' Which tells you so much about her, because it's so insane. But she's down for anything. She'll try anything," Fanning says, adding: "I'm happy she's my 'mum.'" Hoult adds of Anderson's Joanna: "The way she can come in and command such power over people is incredible — both over Catherine and Peter. And there's such a strange dynamic setup in the beginning of that, a really fun one for me to play with her, where she has complete control and power over him. He honestly is just fighting to be away from her a majority of the time because he can't handle being around her."
• How Fanning transformed into a very pregnant Catherine the Great for Season 2