I'll come right out and say it - Victoria is hour-for-hour more purely enjoyable to watch than either the much more vaunted show about a British queen's lengthy tenure, The Crown, or its PBS Sunday night forefather, Downton Abbey. (Yeah I know there are like a thousand Masterpiece Theatre shows from the UK, I'm just comparing the only two I've ever seen, shut up.) It's got high production value but such low, simple, historical stakes - you watch the show mostly just to see Jenna Coleman looking impossibly pretty as a nineteenth century monarch and to hear Prince Albert getting all melodramatic and cutting with his dry German wit.
It's basically a show where the Queen and her Prince are just a bickering old married couple with too many kids. Now in Season 3 the show has added those kids and extended family to the forefront of it all, and you've got just the easiest and most mundane (in the best way) plotlines like "Albert is worried that his son is an idiot" and "Victoria has a rivalry with her sister" and "everyone dresses up like it's the 1700s and has a ball." But lest you think this is all fun and games, fear not, the season premiere is more or less "the Revolutions of 1848 are sweeping across Europe and the royal family might get exiled or killed."
As far as I can tell, there's really no reason for the show to go away anytime soon, either. Normally I love a nice, brisk, couple-seasons-and-get-the-hell-outta-here experience when it comes to dramas, but this thing's just such an easy walk in the park. The timeline begins in 1837, and through three seasons we're only up through 1851. At this rate it'll be another two or three seasons before Prince Albert dies, and then, I mean, we've gotta see Victoria grieve in that aftermath for at least another season more. That'll get us to what, the mid-1860s? Cool, the real Victoria goes on living for another forty years. Go nuts!
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