Starz’s 2017 limited run picks up where BBC One’s The White Queen left off, pitching Jodie Comer’s Elizabeth of York into a shotgun marriage with Jacob Collins-Levy’s battle-wary Henry Tudor. Shot in Bristol and Somerset, the eight episodes span 1485-1487: the new queen must produce a male heir while her mother-in-law Michelle Fairley’s Margaret Beaufort scours the realm for Yorkist pretenders. Emma Frost’s writers’ room folds two Philippa Gregory novels together, trimming the book’s timespan to concentrate on the perilous first years of the dynasty.
The production design favours cold stone and rain-soaked pennants over Tudor pageantry, and composer John Lunn replaces the predecessor’s courtly strings with tense, pulsing motifs. Frost keeps the focus on female agency: the camera lingers on Comer’s face as she weighs personal loyalty against dynastic survival, while Essie Davis’s ex-queen Elizabeth Woodville schemes from sanctuary and Rebecca Benson’s Margaret Pole watches her Plantagenet blood become a liability. Directors Jamie Payne and Alex Kalymnios shoot candle-lit corridor confrontations like spy tradecraft, secrecy the only currency in a palace riddled with hidden staircases and priest holes.
Ratings were modest (a 0.18 live average) yet the series out-performed White Queen on Starz Play, prompting the network to green-light The Spanish Princess as the next Gregory spin-off. The show’s real legacy is Comer’s breakout turn: the same darting eyes and steel she would later train on Killing Eve’s Villanelle first surface here as a princess learning to weaponise silence.
Production Details
STARZ / 1 Season / 8 Episodes / 2017
Created by: Emma Frost Sarah Dollard Loren McLaughlan Amy Roberts Alice Nutter Sarah Phelps
Showrunner(s): Jamie Payne, Michele Buck, Emma Frost
Writer(s): Emma Frost, Amy Roberts, Alice Nutter
Producer(s): Lachlan MacKinnon
Cinematography: Chris Seager
Music: John Lunn
Main Cast
Jodie Comer as Elizabeth of York
Rebecca Benson as Margaret Pole
Jacob Collins-Levy as Henry VII of England
Kenneth Cranham as John Morton
Essie Davis as Elizabeth Woodville
Richard Dillane as Thomas Stanley
Patrick Gibson as Richard of Shrewsbury
Caroline Goodall as Cecily Neville
Amy Manson as Catherine Gordon
Adrian Rawlins as John de la Pole
Vincent Regan as Jasper Tudor
Suki Waterhouse as Cecily of York
