Victoria (2016)

Approach Victoria for what it is--a lavish production with impeccable period details and some impeccable entertainment ones--and you will be pleased. Coleman, who’s wonderful here, assures that anyway.

Victoria is a lesser offering [than Netflix's The Crown], but not without its charms, and it is certainly entertaining enough.

It's no "Downton Abbey" (especially during tedious scenes involving the palace staff), but Victoria has enough glittering chandeliers, glowing candlelight, luxurious furnishings, sumptuous gowns and dazzling jewels to make it undemanding, cozy viewing.

Victoria looks appropriately and enjoyably regal but only fitfully feels stirring enough to expand on the genre's loyal core. Take that as a sign that in the Masterpiece business, the crown has gotten that much heavier.

Anyone who has followed Victoria knows that it puts history through a soap opera wash with exotic floral fabric conditioner. Yet what comes out at the end is usually entertaining, if often perfumed and melodramatic. This opener brought the same lip-glossed, high-production values, but was a bit samey-samey and would have felt flat without the shot in the arm that was cocksure (literally) Lord Palmerston, played by Laurence Fox.

The result is a miniseries that’s easy on the eyes and generally more interesting when capable actors like Jenna Coleman, who plays Victoria, and Rufus Sewell, as her advisor Lord Melbourne, imbue the dialogue and character psyches with more depth than the scripts provide. Subplots about secondary and tertiary characters, which feel like castoffs from lazier “Downton Abbey” seasons, frustrate for a variety of reasons, not least because they’re executed with a lack of flair and originality.

Predictable to the bone--and at times maddeningly redundant--Victoria too often feels like a period drama about the making of a period drama, rather than a deep, authentic breath of rarefied air.