by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copryight © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 9 p.m. last night I turned on what
I thought would be a two-hour Lifetime movie but which turned out to be the
first two episodes of a 10-hour TV miniseries, American Princess — I realized this only when the first hour ended
and was immediately followed by a recap of the events we’d just seen in it. American
Princess is basically a modern-day
knock-off of the 1930 movie Monte Carlo, an acknowledged classic directed by Ernst Lubitsch, written by Ernest
Vajda and Vincent Lawrence from a German play called The Blue Coast by Hans Müller, and starring Jeanette MacDonald as
a woman who runs away from a mismatched marriage her status- and
money-conscious mom has arranged for her and, with nothing but a wedding dress
and a handbag, tears off from the fictitious German principality of
Flausenthurm to Monte Carlo, where she gambles and meets (and ultimately pairs
with) a nobleman posing as a hairdresser (Jack Buchanan). To transform this
plot premise into a 2019 TV series the heroine became Amanda Klein (Georgia
Flood), who’s about to get married in a wedding arranged by a status- and
money-conscious mother to a man named Brett Weinbaum (Max Ehrich) — only just
an hour before the wedding she walks on him getting a blow job from a woman
with long dark hair. We’re obviously supposed to think she’s a hooker — Brett’s
excuse is she’s “a bit of unfinished business from last night” — and Amanda,
who claims later on to be able to give blow jobs as good as anyone else (“A Gay
guy taught me,” she explains), is understandably miffed and runs off wearing
nothing but her wedding dress and, crucially, leaving her cell phone behind.
Since she doesn’t remember any of her family members’ or friends’ phone numbers
(who remembers phone numbers anymore? I
myself have had people I’ve known for years ask me for my phone number because
either they lost their phone or its hard drive crashed, and therefore they no
longer had my number), she has no way to contact them even if she wanted to,
which she doesn’t.
She stumbles upon what she thinks at first is a “theme
wedding” with all the people dressed in the garb of Elizabethan (the first one)
England, but which is actually a Renaissance Festival with both the staff and
the attendees cosplaying in period garb and assuming the personae of the era.
The fair is “ruled” by a woman portraying Queen Elizabeth, who expects everyone
else to stop whatever they’re doing and bow whenever she passes. Amanda ends up
in the audience at one of the festival’s performances, in which William
Shakespeare is supposedly reading his latest works to the Queen. Amanda, who
majored in English in college, knows that Shakespeare never actually was part
of Queen Elizabeth’s court (though he may have been an acquaintance of her
successor, James I — after Elizabeth’s death the name of Shakespeare’s theatre
company changed from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to the King’s Men) and also
calls the re-enactor playing Shakespeare for misattributing a quote from Richard
II to Richard III. She also gets roaring drunk on mead (a concoction
made from fermenting honey, often with fruits and hops thrown in, that was one
of the big alcoholic beverages in Renaissance Europe) and ends up spending the
night — platonically, he assures us — with the Shakespeare guy, David Poland
(Lucas Neff), which when he’s not performing turns out to be an absolutely
drop-dead gorgeous hunk with a hairy, muscular chest (he goes topless a lot, which was just fine by me!), a ring in his left
nipple (until he loses it accidentally) and a reputation for sleeping his way
through every comely (and some not-so-comely) female in the troupe. Indeed, the
20 minutes of episode two I watched (until a family emergency came up) made the
Renaissance Festival seem like an open-air bathhouse for straight cosplayers,
as the Elizabeth re-enactor hastily breaks off her fuck-buddy relationship with
one of the gardeners and another woman introduces Amanda both to her husband
and her lover. (She’s white, her husband is Black and her lover is white, which
gives an interesting “spin” of racial politics on the situation.)
Amanda’s
mother and cousin trace her to the festival and confront her, saying that the
guy she dumped is so rich and such a good “catch” she should overlook minor
little details like him having sex with someone else on their wedding day, and
when Amanda refuses her mom disinherits her, forcing her to beg for work from
the fair’s owner (about the only one associated with it who dresses in normal
21st century clothes). Having worked as a waitress through college,
she figures she could do food service, but her first time as such she ruins a
whole pan of baked pork when the cheap foil pan they’re using (a pity they
weren’t going with a more authentic, and more stable, piece of cookware for the
period — but then undoubtedly no one wanted to stoke a wood-burning stove
either!) tears open and dumps it all over the ground. They end up assigning her
to be one of the “monkeys” who pushes the festival rides (remember that the
merry-go-round was invented in medieval times as a way for knights to practice
jousting; the horses were real and the idea was to spear the brass ring with
your lance so you’d be able to aim better when actually fighting). American
Princess might have been a sheer
delight as a two-hour movie but I’m wondering, based on the hour and 20 minutes
I saw of it, how they’re going to “spin” what’s basically a one-joke
fish-out-of-water premise into a whole 10-hour (less commercials, so it’s
basically about seven hours of actual show) TV series.
