Streaming treat: Do blondes have more fun? David Tennant & Emily Watson in Paula Milne's THE POLITICIAN'S HUSBAND

Note: The following post is written by
our sometimes correspondent, Lee Liberman.

Here scriptwriter Paula Milne (with the help of director, Simon Cellan Jones, shown at left) offers an updated version of her 1996 revenge-plot mini-series, The Politician's Wife, in which the wife undoes her husband's career to punish him for his long affair with an escort. In the new series, THE POLITICAN'S HUSBAND, Milne modernizes spouse, Freya, (Emily Watson), who has not only emancipated herself from the loyal rear guard but is actually better than her husband's professional equal.

Milne's mini-series duo reflects the author's intrigue with betrayal and revenge. The series launches with the Latin phrase: Corruptio optimi pessima -- 'corruption of the best is the worst of all'. The entire drama is devoted to intrigue that shocks and corrupts, leading to revenge, while allowing for a mere shard of hope that true love can survive betrayal.

The focus is on Aiden (David Tennant) -- a power-wound cabinet minister who aims to lead the Labour Party (he's also a righteous democrat lobbying for liberal immigration reform) about to be betrayed by his oldest and dearest friend, fellow cabinet minister, Bruce, (the handsome Ed Stoppard, above, right, son of playwright Tom). Bruce covets the prime minister post and willingly ruins his closest friend whose picture-perfect life he envies. Bruce then organizes the promotion of Freya (above, left) from back bench to cabinet minister and attempts to win her away from Aiden.

The politicking is set against the busy complex family life of the married MP's, Freya and Aiden, dubbed the golden couple of the liberal political establishment. They have two young children including one with Aspergers syndrome whose difficulties pain Aiden particularly. Also there's grandfather (Jack Shepherd), a retired academic who pitches in with the kids and serves as Aiden's compass about what really matters. We see Freya and Aiden communicate, problem-solve, jointly share household duties, and seek comfort in each other sexually. They are a more cohesive team than any I can think of off-hand on film and the depth of their relationship makes you root for it. However, once Aiden and Freya have traded places between back bench and cabinet, things begin to shift (in and out of bed).

While Freya has always supported his climb and assumed the larger burden of family, their new roles challenge Aiden's obsessive need to be in control. (He punctures her diaphragm, wishing for a pregnancy to put things back the way they were.) And Freya, who had vicariously enjoyed Aiden's successes as though they were her own, comes to wield her own political power as though born to it, and she repels her husband's self-interested meddling. Aiden reaches a boil when he thinks Freya has cheated on him with Bruce; he stages a devastating coup of his own. When Freya realizes how willingly he had put her career in jeopardy, she and we begin to doubt the marriage can survive. The way they do move forward together provides a chill, our wondering exactly how hollowed out their relationship has become. The situation is not totally devoid of hope given Freya's emotional intelligence, deftly, quietly conveyed by Ms Watson.

As Aiden, Tennant is coiffed a carefully clipped blond, adding a look of serpentine stealth and menace to his parliamentary stagecraft and to the turn-around of his dead- ended career (at Bruce's expense). Both Freya and Aiden are unusually compelling characters for their mix of sympathetic and predatory traits -- are we all bad when driven to it? Tennant, described in media as a British golden boy, recently starred in Masterpiece Mystery's The Escape Artist and has a long roster of film and TV credits (as well as having lit the torch at the British Olympics).

Watch this one streaming on Netflix for an amped-up ride through high stakes politics and intimate family drama -- and note who is on top.

Lee Liberman's streaming tip -- Duff/Hardy in Milne/Giedroyc's ELIZABETH I: VIRGIN QUEEN

This emotionally absorbing version of the life of Elizabeth I (BBC/PBS Boston, 2005) begs attention to its lead, distinguished British actress Anne-Marie Duff. Among her many credits, Duff starred in Shameless (series streaming on Netflix); had a supporting role as a whiney social-climber in the BBC2/HBO mini-series, Parade's End; and she just ended a run at NYC's Lincoln Center as a glamorous Lady MacBeth opposite Ethan Hawke's MacBeth.

In Elizabeth I: the Virgin Queen, Duff (shown at left) dazzles and convinces compared to other Elizabeth's -- more so than Glenda Jackson, Cate Blanchett, or Helen Mirren, for instance. Although credit or debit goes to the actor, the writing is all important, Duff has said; her Queen is a brilliant living creation rather than a scripted historical figure. Some find Duff histrionic but her view of her job is to embrace the truth of each person she plays -- likeable or not. Here, she dazzles while being difficult and appearing plain.

This re-imagining of Elizabeth's gleaming tenure hangs on a love story -- that of her intense relationship with childhood friend and advisor, Robert Dudley -- rather than on an orderly chronology of events. Major events reveal her personality -- the shrewd, coy, jealous, manipulative, vain, and absolutely devoted head of state. One running theme is her advisors' dogged efforts to get her to marry. Elizabeth used those years to improve her domination over the male power structure by pitting suitors and courtiers against each other for her favor, gradually creating a cult of personality as "Virgin Queen" married to her people. This circumvented her privy council's marriage imperative while also providing a steady diet of the adoration she must have craved as Henry VIII's out-of-favor child. Above all she sabotaged any effort to interfere with her supremacy ("I will have no man rule over me").

One reviewer called the production "a hodge-podge treatise on sexual frustration", but Elizabeth had plenty of motive to avoid marriage, her father having decapitated her mother, Anne Boleyn, and set upon her many step-mothers. Her defensive armor against marriage "comes at the price of a cold bed', warned Dudley, who wanted to marry her and whom she dangled for years even though she loved him. Played by a seductive Tom Hardy (at right and further above), Dudley stayed at her side during his two marriages until his death, leaving Elizabeth bereft and miserable. (His role as Dudley was a star turn for Hardy, who lately fills his dance card in Hollywood blockbuster and B-list movie parts.)

But as attractive as Tom Hardy's Dudley, the production sells short the real Robert Dudley, writing him as a boy-toy whom Elizabeth promoted and enriched in order to keep close rather than as the statesman he was. The Dudley of history came from ruined nobility but used Elizabeth's patronage to foster the Renaissance. He was a patron of all the arts, scholarship, exploration, a modern business entrepreneur, and a master at foreign policy and war -- in short a fit advisor and companion for his brilliant Queen. The real Dudley's role in the Renaissance is worth knowing and there's no inkling of it here.

Whatever the flaws in this barreling narrative, all are outweighed by the sheer force of Duff's Elizabeth and the poignancy of her frustrated relationships. One admires how the girl outwits and bends the forces against her, how the woman triumphs, suffers loss, and endures the indignities of aging. At her death, we ourselves are bereaved. Her last advisor Robert Cecil tells us: "Then the flame was extinguished and she began to slip away from us. Too weak to walk, she has spent the last 15 hours standing in her chamber, refusing to sit, lest she never rise again..." (middle fingers drawn across her mouth like a child seeking comfort.) "Then after 40 years as sovereign, she quietly departed this life."

Paula Milne, writer (shown at right), and Coky Giedroyc, director, (shown below) score a triumph making Elizabeth's life and eccentricities imaginable and their plucking the extraordinary Anne-Marie Duff out of the firmament of fine actresses to get the job done. The pulsing, haunting score deserves special mention, a combination of medieval and Celtic songs and chants sung by The Mediaeval Baebes and The London Bulgarian Choir, among others.

Now that Elizabeth's story has been told over and over, it could be time to explore this period through the man who sat close to power and used his own to nurture the institutions that produced a Golden Age. That would be Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, himself, a very original Renaissance man. Elizabeth I: Virgin Queen, running just under four hours, is available now on DVD and streaming from Netflix or via Amazon and Amazon Instant Video.

This post was written by TrustMovies' guest columnist, 

Lee Liberman, who will be joining us 

now and again to cover various films.