What’s A Very British Scandal about? To borrow the appropriately accented words of Adele: divorce, babe, divorce. In the first trailer for the three-episode series, Paul Bettany (WandaVision) and Claire Foy (The Crown) star as the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, a real-life couple that went through a famously brutal breakup in 1963. Their divorce trial made sensational headlines and involved accusations of forgery, bribery, theft, infidelity, and more. But the upcoming show from BBC One and Amazon Studios seems to promise a more nuanced take on the woman once dubbed the “Dirty Duchess.†The trailer includes a shot of an angry Bettany knocking things over. At one point, he demands that his wife pay the bills. “We have to stop doing terrible things to each other,†Foy later tells him.
As their relationship deteriorates, we see her getting hounded by the press and growing angrier at her husband’s claims. “He doesn’t get to divorce me, I get to divorce him,†she vows. Meanwhile, Bettany proclaims that he has “the photograph,†likely a reference to an explicit photo of the Duchess that was central to the divorce case. A Very British Scandal comes from the same team behind 2018’s A Very English Scandal, which dramatized Jeremy Thorpe’s affair and starred Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw. The new series will air on BBC One across three nights, from December 26 to 28, while U.S. viewers will be able to watch it on Amazon Prime Video in 2022.