The first season of The Empress made a splash two years ago because it was sexy and playful and filled a hole that Bridgerton fans needed filled while waiting for their favorite show to come back. The second season of the series is a bit more serious than the first, but still full of sex, rivalries and other interesting storylines.
THE EMPRESS SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A man in uniform walks through a wooded area. “1856 – AT THE GATES OF VIENNA.” The man meets someone in butchers’ clothes, carrying a bloody package. He puts the package in a decorative box, gets in a carriage with his boss, a duke, for a diplomatic visit.
The Gist: Elisabeth von Wittelsbach (Devrim Lingnau), Empress of Austria, is lingering in a bathtub; she is very pregnant with her second child. She and her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph (Philip Froissant) are under huge pressure to produce a male heir to the throne, but Elisabeth is just happy that her young daughter will get a younger brother or sister.
Franz’s mother, Sophia (Melika Foroutan), hates that she has to depend on a boy to be born in order to ensure the line of succession stays in her family. Still, she shows Franz his old childhood military garb, telling him it’s going to be a gift for the new child. Franz, ever reluctant in his royal duties, tells his mom to back off those expectations. However, the midwife helping the Empress assures them they’re having a boy, and she is apparently never wrong about these things.
The duchesses in Elisabeth’s court, led by Charlotte von Stubenberg (Runa Greiner), are busy making sure she’s being taken care of. One duchess she doesn’t want anywhere near the empress is Leontine de Apafi (Almila Bagriacik), who is a close friend of Elisabeth’s. It turns out that not only is Leontine carrying on a secret affair with Fritsch (Eric Bouwer), the royal couple’s doctor, but Charlotte knows something about Leontine that she thinks would be very damaging if Elisabeth found out about it.
During a reception where the Empress receives gifts from delegations within the Hapsburg empire, the man who got the bloody package, who is from Lombardy-Venetia, sweatily presents Elisabeth with the “gift”: A severed cow’s tongue. As Elisabeth drops the box in shock, the man professes that she and the Emperor need to free Lombardy from Hapsburg rule. He’s chased out of the hall and is fatally shot; Elisabeth comes to his aid, despite everyone warning her not to do so.
Emperor Franz finds out that, while they’ve been dealing with other insurgents, Lombardy and other colonies have been banding together to fight for an independent Italy. He needs to talk to France’s emperor, Napoleon III, to see if they’ll fight these insurgents with Austria, but he knows he can’t approach Napoleon himself. This is when he dispatches a note to his wayward brother, Archduke Maximillian (Johannes Nussbaum), currently in exile for treasonous behavior and despondent about his situation.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We compared the first season of The Empress to Bridgerton, and that comparison still applies, though things seem more serious and less sexy this season.
Our Take: As we just mentioned, The Empress feels more serious in its second season. There are still some sexual romps in the first episode, but it seems that Elisabeth and Franz are too busy with their royal responsibilities to participate in any of them.
What we wonder is how much of the season is going to be about the threats to Franz’s empire and his throne, and how much he wants to engage in battle in order to save it. We also wonder if the season will be about Elisabeth railing against all of the formalities of her position, including the fact that she hasn’t yet produced a male heir.
The first season had an objective, which was to show how the romance between Elisabeth and Franz transcended all of the royal duties, obligations and protocols that were working against them. But the second season feels more like the two of them facing threats to their thrones and their marriage. What we hope is that the latter threats will be what showrunner Katharina Eyssen and her writers concentrate on during the second season instead of the first, despite having real history as the basis of the story.
Sex and Skin: Given that there’s a scene of Charlotte getting oral sex from a man perched under her voluminous dress, the answer to that is “yes.”
Parting Shot: While despondently floating in the ocean, Maximillian gets a telegram from his brother, Emperor Franz.
Sleeper Star: Almila Bagriacik’s Leontine has a lot of secrets, and it looks like we’ll find out about them this season.
Most Pilot-y Line: “I’m sorry, Your Majesty. It’s a girl,” a nurse says to Franz after Elisabeth traumatically gives birth.
Our Call: STREAM IT. There should still be enough going on in Season 2 of The Empress to keep viewers’ interest, but the show definitely feels like there’s been a tonal change in the new season.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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