The new series settles for one, Dominic Cooke, with the text adapted by Cooke and Ben Power (who co-wrote the screenplay for the earlier “Richard II”). The earlier “Hollow Crown” assigned its four plays to three different directors and came in a variety of styles. It recounts the history of the houses of Lancaster and York as they vie for control of England across much of the 15th century, and if you’re a viewer whose conception of warring houses comes mostly from “Game of Thrones,” these films seem to have been made, in part, with you in mind. Three years after the BBC filmed the four Elizabethan docudramas known as “The Henriad” - “Richard II,” “Henry IV” (parts 1 and 2) and “Henry V” - as “The Hollow Crown,” it picks up the history with “The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses,” which premieres in the U.S. Four centuries on, we’re still stealing from and staging him. And yet, in 2016 it also feels far more fitting that instead of “ We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, ” we have “now is the winter of our discontent.Shakespeare is the guy, your one-stop author for every sort of person and condition and situation - everything you need to comprehend the strange, messy richness of human life is encompassed within his collected works. As such, this second series of the Hollow Crown ends in a much darker and more uncertain place than Tom Hiddleston’s rousing St. The Battle of Bosworth ended the Wars of the Roses, even though the new Tudor King would be initially plagued by his own issues and paranoia at Yorks attempting to rise around him. That sense of scope - of decades of imprisonment and murder sweeping through the royal classes as waves of blood and torture - makes Richard III all the more intensely dramatic and even poignant.
But to get the full sense of the story that was intended, give the Henry episodes a chance beforehand as well (where Cumberbatch does feature, at least in Part 2). The Richard III episode premieres Christmas Day, so Cumberbatch fans can watch him in that and then in Sherlock a week later.
It is fully medieval both in tongue and in tone, and even more engaging than the initial installments of the first Hollow Crown series. But the experience is not like watching a play on screen, as Dominic Cooke has directed each part with a clear vision of filmic aesthetics, and along with that, a ghastly amount of violence (the deaths of the princes in the tower being particularly horrifying).
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