TV Talk: ‘Ripley’ is a bore; ‘Mary & George’ delights

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

In season two of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” poor Tanya McQuoid-Hunt (Jennifer Coolidge) begged for help from a ship’s captain, saying, “Please, these gays, they’re trying to murder me!”

Plenty of characters might make a similar plea in two of this week’s highest-profile new series.

‘Ripley’

There’s already a perfectly good — great, actually! — movie based on Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (the 1999 film starring Matt Damon as the title character), so why would anyone make an inferior, eight-hour version today?

Yes, yes, I know Hollywood now thinks each generation needs its own filmed version of a story that’s been told before but other than unnecessarily elongating the story and filming it in black and white, Netflix’s adaptation does nothing to improve on the Oscar-nominated film that already exists.

No wonder Showtime, which originally ordered and made this “Ripley,” bailed and sold it off to the No. 1 streaming service. “Ripley” is a stinker.

Andrew Scott (“Fleabag”) stars as Tom Ripley, a conman who’s tasked by a wealthy American shipping magnate with convincing the rich man’s son, Dickey (Johnny Flynn), to abandon his Italian enclave and come back home. Dickey’s girlfriend, Marge (Dakota Fanning), casts a wary eye at Tom from the first time she meets him.

Adapted, written and directed by Steven Zaillian, the one thing “Ripley” has going for it at times is the direction that gives off Hitchcock vibes, particularly an extended scene in episode four. That’s a pretty amazing scene for its style and dark comic vibes. But one scene does not make a series worthwhile.

Like the 1999 film, Netflix’s “Ripley,” now streaming, nods at the notion that Ripley is attracted to Dickey but it’s honestly more subtle here, perhaps because Scott’s Ripley is more of a weirdo than Damon’s sun-dappled Ripley.

In interviews for the series, Zaillian and Scott have both espoused the notion that “Ripley” needed to be eight episodes because, “You don’t read a novel in two hours. It takes eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours — and I felt that the pace and the beauty of the storytelling in that book I would try to create in this form.”

Great, so go read the book. Viewers aren’t well served by this over-long adaptation.

‘Mary & George’

Period European productions have come a long way from the stuffy costume dramas of yesteryear. Following the juicy plotting of Catherine de Medici (Samantha Morton) in season one of Starz’s 16th-century-set “The Serpent Queen” (season two is in production), the same network gets even saucier and more explicit with “Mary & George” (now streaming, airs on linear Starz at 9 p.m. Fridays beginning April 5), inspired by the true story of Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore) who trains her pretty, boyish son, George (Nicholas Galitzine, “Red, White Royal Blue”) to seduce Britain’s gay King James I (Tony Curran). (Yes, in “Mary & George” the namesake of the King James Bible partakes in orgies.)

This is another modern take on a period drama where four-letter words fly out of characters’ mouths at a rapid clip and simulated sex scenes are explicit, including several instances of male full-frontal nudity. “Mary & George” doesn’t define George’s sexuality, which is more opportunistic and probably more omnisexual than homosexual, even though he has sex with more men than women in the series.

While George may be catnip to the king, it’s Moore’s Mary who steals the show with her plotting and scheming, doing whatever it takes to accumulate power and put her humble beginnings to bed. British actress Nicola Walker (“Annika,” “Last Tango in Halifax”) also gets a bounty of juicy lines as her Lady Hatton continuously snipes at Mary.

And Galitzine deserves kudos for making George a likable anti-hero, one whose schemes at times melt away to reveal actual tenderness.

Inspired by the 2018 Benjamin Woolley book (“The King’s Assassin: The Fatal Affair of George Villiers and James I”) and written for TV by DC Moore (“Killing Eve”), the seven-episode limited series zips along with all manner of surprising plot turns. George isn’t as murderous as Ripley, but he’s just as manipulative which in this story is more important; manipulation is the coin of the realm.