Mary & George spoilers follow — and they’re extremely gay.

Sky’s Mary & George – starring Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine – starts with crying, but this royal affair isn’t a sad one.

No, it’s a deliciously cruel reimagining of the true story of Mary and George Villiers, charting their ascent from poverty to the court of King James VI and I (played by Tony Curran).

The crying we hear in the opening scene is George wailing as a newborn baby in the moments after he’s born to Mary.

“Shit, who dropped him?” asks Moore’s character, although she doesn’t sound particularly interested in the answer or even alarmed by the situation, for that matter. Julianne is literally mothering here, but the mothering on display isn’t going to win Mary an award for Best Mother anytime soon.

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“Before I cut you free, what should I call you?” asks Mary. “Should I even bother?” she adds, knowing that the second son is usually of no value to anyone in 17th-century England.

“I should have left you on the floor to rot,” she says, but she didn’t, and so begins the story of their joint rise to power, told through a seductively brutal historical lens based on Benjamin Woolley’s nonfiction book The King’s Assassin.

As George grows into an attractive, capable young bisexual, Mary does what any good mother would do: she exploits her son’s hotness by making him seduce the King, a raging homosexual whose bed is home to a who’s who of young gay hotties circa 1612.

These “semen guzzlers”, as they’re described at one point, meet their match in Mary and George. And that’s even true for Robert Carr (Laurie Davidson), the 1st Earl of Somerset, despite his best efforts to sabotage George, his closest rival for James’s affections (and tongue).

To reach the top (or bottom, as George actor Nicholas Galitzine does so often in his films), Mary and George have no qualms about lying, cheating, backstabbing or even killing people if it means they can secure themselves a life of prosperity in the King’s royal court.

They’re not the only cruel ones either. James himself is downright inhumane at times, and Nicola Walker’s turn as Elizabeth Hatton left us screaming, like when she describes George as: “The sodomite with the gallow’s eyes who thinks his shaft and taint are the centre of the Earth.” But given how involved his shaft and taint actually are when it comes to royal affairs, George is kind of right to think so, honestly.

In that regard, the show is essentially “be gay, do crime” personified. Aside from Hatton, almost everyone is queer in some way (although even she channels camp to perfection) and, funnily enough, everyone on the show is also a monstrous piece of shit.

That’s okay though. In fact, it’s actually a huge strength of this story, something that sets Mary & George apart from not just other period dramas, but other queer shows, full stop.

Past attempts to villainise LGBTQ+ people as ‘evil’, simply for being who they are, evolved into a vicious trope that pushed some writers in the opposite direction, romanticising queer people as more heroic in fear of feeding into damaging stereotypes. That’s understandable yet ultimately inaccurate, because queer people can suck just as much as straight people do. And no, we don’t mean like that.

Aside from a few exceptions like Looking, Queer As Folk, and The Other Two, it’s still rare to see chaotic queers dominate a show like Mary & George, and it’s even rarer to see that unfold in a historical setting (Our Flag Means Death aside). By making almost everyone here queer, it doesn’t matter that they’re all evil to varying degrees, because there’s no straight “hero” who they can be compared to unfavourably.

It’s curious that the few straight characters who do exist in this show are mostly fine with homosexuality, despite them all living in the not-so progressive 17th century. Like Bridgerton does with race, Mary & George imagines a world where queerness is far more tolerated than you’d expect for the time, which gives the gays a lot more space to be delightfully evil.

In fact, there’s something rather empowering about seeing queerness wielded as a weapon against others. That’s not to say we should all be horrible gays just for the sake of it, but the way George uses queer sex to get what he wants, be it a flash of his extremely bisexual earring or a flick of his wavy hair, is akin to reclaiming a slur. What’s long been deemed as “weak” or “wrong” brings George strength and influence in this brutal high society.

The same is true for Mary. Given she’s the key matriarchal figure of the whole show, it would be easy to assume that she’s straight, yet it’s only when she’s being submissive to Sandie, her sex-worker-turned-consort, that Mary softens her cruel, spiteful exterior. Whether she’s bisexual or actually just forced to sleep with men to ascend in society remains unclear, but what is clear is the power she wields as a queer Mother (with a capital M, of course).

Mary and George don’t get off scot-free from all their atrocities, though. George attempts to die by suicide multiple times before he’s eventually murdered, while Mary suffers years of abuse and mockery from husbands and high society alike, not to mention the death of her one true love.

It’s not as if the show is trying to punish them for their gay misdeeds, however, as was often the case in older queer narratives. The takeaway here is that the world sucks for everyone, queer or straight, so why not reclaim the evil queer/bisexual cliche to ease that suffering in any way you can? Why cry tears of sadness when you can use a fancy neckerchief to mop up the tears of your enemies instead? We jest, kind of.

Mary & George is now available to watch on Sky Atlantic and streaming service NOW.