With Yanxi Palace: Princess Adventures, Netflix hopes to capitalise on the runaway success of Story of Yanxi Palace
- The sequel to the original 70-part series is as bright, bold and beautiful to behold as its predecessor
- Plus, Armando Iannucci’s Avenue 5 takes aim at space tourism and things don’t look too promising
Whatever it is – nostalgia, soft power, an outlet for national pride – the quasi-historical costume drama with Chinese characteristics is a mighty tool. Maybe the secret is in the headdresses and hairdos.
Thus are we dazzled by a vision of an 18th-century China in which the order of the day – particularly in the minefield of love – is chicanery. All imperial court notables have ulterior motives, everyone is working an angle, scheming, conspiring, making and breaking allegiances and visiting casual brutality on their servants … all tactics in the game that makes Yanxi Palace: Princess Adventures, now streaming on Netflix an absorbing romp.
Wang Yuwei plays Prince Chaoyong of Mongolia, a fledgling Prince Charming betrothed to the petulant, capricious teenaged Zhaohua but hopelessly outclassed in the connivance-as-chivalry stakes by Forbidden City guard and snake in the grass Fuk’anggan (Wang Yizhe). Trying to do the honourable thing while regularly outflanked is Nie Yuan, as the Qianlong Emperor.
But for all the gripping complexities of Qing dynasty devotion and treachery, it’s the forgotten set designers, hairdressers and costumiers who here make the fabric of history such a sight to behold – bright, bold and far more salubrious than it really was.
In HBO’s Avenue 5, Armando Iannucci takes aim at the absurdities of space tourism
In space, no one can hear you scream – with laughter at the cosmic incompetence and vacuum-filling vacuousness of the crew and passengers of Avenue 5, a hulking space cruise ship on its maiden outing, touring around Saturn in eight weeks.
The voyage soon becomes the space-cation from hell, however, turning into a three-year mission to boldly go, somehow, back to Earth after a pesky “gravity flip” throws the vessel wildly off course. Which hardly goes down well with those tourists trapped on deck with husbands, wives and thousands of other people they detest. Their petty complaints and pointless interests waste no time poisoning the pressurised atmosphere.
Step aboard the cast-adrift world of satirist Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, whose latest biting comedy vehicle, set 40 years hence, suggests that the coming commodification of space means all the little green men (and women) have much to fear.
Various Iannucci regulars lead the blundering way in Avenue 5 (blasting off tomorrow at 11am on HBO Go and HBO), chief among them Hugh Laurie as captain Ryan Clark, exposed early on as a suave, clueless blagger in a uniform abetted in calamity by Zach Woods and Rebecca Front. Stealing up the inside track for comedy golden gongs, however, is Japanese-American sitcom stalwart Suzy Nakamura, here playing a no-nonsense, no-pleasantries PA to the author of this galactic goof, the arrogant, vindictive, tacky billionaire Herman Judd (Josh Gad).
Things won’t look good for the universe if the biggest yoga class in space – “a yoga supernova” – ever really takes place. As with all galactic sci-fi, even the comedic, what we’re really looking at is a reflection of what’s happening back here on Earth.
Fly me to the moon.
