• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, January 13, 2017

The experience of watching the two-hour premiere of “Victoria” felt about as long as Queen Victoria’s 64-year reign, but not nearly as satisfying.

With this new winter series premiering this weekend, PBS makes a bold play for teen viewers. The show is a dramatization (and hence at least semi-, if not entirely, fictional) of the earliest and most vulnerable period of Victoria’s long reign over the British empire. 

In contrast to the more stern image of the older Victoria that predominates in the minds of most of us, this Victoria (played by Jenna Coleman, pictured above center) is all of 18 years old. She is at times willful, stubborn and impetuous.

Like many teenagers, she expresses frustration with her mother. She also moons over a handsome older man -- the dashing prime minister, Lord Melbourne (played by Rufus Sewell).

The young Victoria of this series is naïve about the motivations of other people who are conspiring against her. She is also ignorant of the stagecraft that is part and parcel of her job as Queen of England. At a ball, she gets tipsy on champagne and is oblivious when a Russian nobleman she is dancing with begins to feel her up.

This series made its debut last August in the U.K., where the production of TV shows dramatizing that country’s glorious past seems never-ending. This Sunday (Jan. 15), “Victoria” takes up residence on PBS’s “Masterpiece” in the hallowed time period formerly occupied by “Downton Abbey,” to which it pales in comparison.

In “Victoria,” a number of actors strut and fret their ways upon the stage -- but that’s all they seem to do.

At one point during the two-hour premiere, I hatched the idea of going back to the beginning to count the many scenes in which characters are seen strolling down august corridors or prim garden pathways with their chins in the air and their hands clasped solemnly behind their backs, conversing and gossiping with fellow courtiers or government ministers.

Much of the first two hours of “Victoria” plays this way, with the actors looking more like they’re posing than acting. 

Then there’s the near-unbearable fakeness of this show’s reliance on computer-generated special effects. These are used often in “Victoria” -- as they are in many period TV shows and movies whenever a scene-setting bird’s-eye view or ground-level shot of an urban environment from another era is called for.

In “Victoria,” you get many overhead shots of 19th-century London that are so cartoonish you almost want to burst out laughing. You also think to yourself: Who are they kidding?

This first “chapter” of “Victoria” -- the first of eight episodes ending on March 5 -- concerns itself with the teen queen ascending to the throne in 1837 and her struggle to earn the confidence of parliament as the empire’s new head of state.

For most of these two hours, a plot is afoot that would have the legislators somehow declaring the young Victoria either insane or incompetent and installing a “regent” to govern on her behalf. The plotting is what leads to all of the confidential strolling and stiff, wooden meetings between the various plotters.

In fact, this storyline went on for so long and was repeated so many times that I even said out loud at some point: Would you people just settle this regency question once and for all so I can get on with my life?

How does it end? Believe me: It is not worth waiting two hours for.

My advice would have been: Cut out about half of the sinister strolls by conspirators and plotters and you’d have a one-hour show that might not have been any less dull -- but at least it would have been shorter.

“Victoria on Masterpiece” premieres Sunday (Jan. 15) at 9 p.m. Eastern on PBS.