For King and Country

By Richard Zoglin

What is a King good for? Perhaps no question better illustrates the political gap separating Britain from America. The British royal family is simultaneously venerated and dragged through the mud, looked up to for stability and moral authority, and disparaged as powerless and irrelevant. Imagine if Bill Clinton had to answer to Queen Elizabeth as well as Bob Dole.

Better yet, watch Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) face a similar problem in To Play the King, a wickedly entertaining BBC mini-series that has just debuted on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre for a four-week run. Urquhart, the Machiavellian party hack who schemed his way to the prime ministry in the 1990 mini-series House of Cards, is now ensconced in power but facing an unexpected challenge from the newly crowned King of England. The politically naive but idealistic monarch (modeled loosely on Prince Charles) has taken to delivering feisty, compassionate speeches about the poor and staging canny photo ops in the ghetto -- a campaign that is starting to turn the nation against Urquhart's cold-blooded Conservative policies. To the PM, His Royal Majesty is nothing but a royal pain. "The trouble is, he has ideas," he tells an aide, words dripping with scorn. "He has a conscience. He wants to contribute."

Surrounding this clash between King and commoner is a whirl of political intrigue. There's a Fergie-like princess with a potentially explosive diary, a royal aide hiding a homosexual affair and assorted political tricksters, both dirty and deadly. Like its predecessor, To Play the King is a wonderfully savvy, supremely cynical picture of real-world politics that makes American efforts in the same vein (JFK: Reckless Youth) look like Saturday-morning cartoons. Michael Kitchen, as the King, is starchy yet appealingly human; in its fictional way, To Play the King does more to demystify the British monarchy than any Daily Mail photos of Princess Di in the exercise gym. The face-to-face confrontations between King and Prime Minister are epic battles of wills and words worthy of George Bernard Shaw. Yet Urquhart's monstrousness ! has taken on almost Shakespearean proportions; the murder that ended Part I continues to haunt him like Banquo's ghost.

With the key creative people from House of Cards returning (writer Andrew Davies, director Paul Seed), To Play the King is a rare sequel that advances rather than diminishes the original. But it doesn't entirely escape redundancy. Urquhart hires a pretty young political operative (Kitty Aldridge) who is seduced by his power just as investigative reporter Mattie Storin was in House of Cards. Urquhart's asides to the camera, charming in the first part, become somewhat precious and predictable by the end of the second.

But Richardson remains a marvel; we feast on a face that reveals everything with the arch of an eyebrow or the sag of a cheek muscle. His calculated temper tantrums are as believable as the silky menace in his most understated lines ("I couldn't possibly comment"). This is TV's scariest, most alluring villain since J.R. Ewing.