Why The Great Is a Feminist Triumph in Historical Comedy

The Great takes the story of Catherine the Great and turns it into something deliberately unruly: part period drama, part political satire, part sex comedy, and part feminist fantasy. Created by Tony McNamara, the series follows Catherine, played by Elle Fanning, as she arrives in eighteenth-century Russia expecting romance and enlightenment, only to find a violent court ruled by Peter III, played with gleeful cruelty by Nicholas Hoult.

Its history is knowingly unreliable. The series calls itself “an occasionally true story”, freeing it from the pressure to reproduce the past exactly. That invention is the point. By bending historical fact, The Great exposes the systems that have traditionally made powerful men look inevitable while treating women’s ambition as an amusing exception.

History Rewritten as a Feminist Argument

Catherine’s rise is often presented in official histories as the achievement of an extraordinary woman who succeeded within a male political world. The Great asks what that world actually demanded from her. She must perform obedience, navigate sexual violence, build alliances and turn the restrictive rituals of court life into instruments of power.

The show’s comic anachronisms make those structures visible. Characters speak with modern bluntness about sex, consent, education and political legitimacy, even while wearing elaborate costumes and living in palaces. The clash between contemporary language and historical setting prevents viewers from accepting oppression as simply “the way things were”.

For Australian audiences, that method may feel familiar from local debates about whose version of history is treated as authoritative. School curricula, public monuments and political speeches can frame national stories as settled, even when women, First Nations people and working-class communities have been pushed to the margins. The Great uses historical parody to challenge that kind of selective memory.

Catherine’s Education Is Also a Political Awakening

Catherine begins the series as an idealist. She believes reading, reason and compassion can improve society, and she initially imagines that Peter might be persuaded into becoming a better ruler. Her transformation does not mean abandoning her principles. It means learning that principles require strategy, collective action and a willingness to confront power.

That development gives the show its strongest feminist idea: intelligence is not passive virtue. Catherine’s knowledge becomes dangerous because it changes what she can imagine and what others fear she might achieve. She studies the machinery of government while men around her underestimate her, assuming that a young foreign bride can be contained by etiquette.

Her political education also has an emotional cost. The series refuses the fantasy that empowerment makes trauma disappear. Catherine experiences betrayal, grief and compromises that complicate her victory. Feminism here is not a makeover in which a woman becomes invulnerable; it is the process of recognising her own agency within an unjust system.

Comedy Makes Patriarchy Look Absurd

The Great understands that patriarchy survives partly through performance. Peter’s authority depends on uniforms, ceremonies, inherited titles and the constant repetition of his own importance. Nicholas Hoult plays him as both terrifying and ridiculous, exposing the insecurity beneath his entitlement without removing the danger he represents.

That tonal instability is crucial. A scene can move from a vulgar joke to a brutal reminder of state violence in seconds. The laughter never fully releases the tension because the audience knows that the powerful people behaving like fools still control armies, prisons and women’s lives.

The comedy also allows the show to ridicule the mythology of the “great man”. Peter expects reverence because he was born into power, while Catherine has to invent a political identity from almost nothing. Their contrast turns leadership into a question of labour: who studies, listens, plans and takes responsibility, and who merely assumes obedience?

Women’s Solidarity Is Messy and Necessary

Catherine’s revolution is not a solitary achievement. Her relationships with Marial, played by Phoebe Fox, and other women at court reveal how survival can become collaboration. These women do not always agree, and their loyalties are shaped by class, desire, resentment and self-preservation. That friction makes their solidarity more convincing than a simple sisterhood slogan.

The series also gives women sexual agency without pretending sex is automatically liberating. Desire can be pleasurable, strategic, tender or politically dangerous. Catherine’s relationships are part of her emotional life, but they are never allowed to become the sole explanation for her choices.

The show has limits. Its treatment of race and empire is uneven, and its satirical world can flatten historical complexities into stylish entertainment. Still, it creates room for a broader conversation about who gets to be complicated on screen. Women are allowed to be ambitious, vain, funny, ruthless, loving and wrong without being reduced to a moral lesson.

Why the Satire Still Lands in Australia

The Great resonates in Australia because its central conflict is recognisable even when its setting is not. Audiences in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are used to political spectacle, media spin and institutions that present tradition as proof of legitimacy. A palace coup may be exaggerated, but the struggle over who gets heard, believed and represented is not.

Its availability to Australian viewers through the local streaming market, including platforms such as Stan, also places the series within a culture that increasingly rewards sharp, genre-bending television. Viewers accustomed to Australian political satire, irreverent comedy and period productions can appreciate how the show uses laughs to smuggle in arguments about power.

There is a particular pleasure in watching Catherine reject the expectation that she should be grateful for access to a room. That idea speaks to workplace cultures, parliamentary representation and public conversations about gendered authority in Australia. The series does not offer a realistic manual for reform, but it makes a compelling emotional case for refusing inherited power.

Ways to Read The Great as Feminist Television

• Treat the historical inaccuracies as deliberate criticism of whose stories become “official” history.
• Watch Catherine’s friendships and alliances as political relationships, not background to the romance.
• Notice how costumes, ceremonies and sexual customs manufacture masculine authority.
• Pay attention to the tension between individual empowerment and the wider class system.
• Compare the show’s satire with Australian debates about institutions, leadership and representation.

The Great is a feminist triumph disguised as historical comedy because its jokes do more than decorate the plot. They dismantle the grandeur surrounding violent men, make women’s political intelligence visible and turn historical storytelling into an argument about power. Watch it for the lavish costumes and outrageous dialogue, then stay for the sharper question underneath: what changes when women stop treating authority as something they must politely request?