another thingie about reign (although, no one asked, and i’m rewatching for some reason because  i’ve like…run out of things to watch, i guess, and it’s been long enough that it feels fresh) that was so infuriating was like…it was actually close to being good, with the aesthetic?

by which i mean, it was all very close to flowing together and being believable… it was very close to, at the very least, not being jarring.

because i feel like with a historic drama, you have limited options when it comes to that. you can either do it 90-100% anachronistic (which reign did not do, aesthetically), in a tongue-in-cheek way (sort of like…galavant, i guess?); or for the most part faithful to the setting and events of the era, with a few anachronisms just sprinkled in there, sort of like with the tudors (which showed, for instance, a printing press as a ‘new invention’ for england in 1530) in regard to costumes (which were often elizabethan rather than henrician, and sometimes not even close to being faithful to a nearby century’s fashion) etc. 

but reign did like, 70/30 or 80/20 for anachronism vs. historic realism and it’s frustrating because it was so close to being harmonious, and instead it ended up being discordant. it’s like listening to a piano piece and hearing the pianist hit the wrong notes, and seeing the right ones on the keyboard, close to their hands but unplayed.