Intro for June 27, 2024

Dear Gossips,  

I’m over a month late to this party but I’m not sorry because this show came to me at the perfect time. I’ve been at home sick this week which means as soon as I’m done working on the site I crawl into bed and it’s the perfect time to binge and the series I binged on Tuesday, the day I was at my lowest, was Maxton Hall. Didn’t bother coming up for air, all six episodes straight through, just like that. Then rewatched it yesterday. God it was glorious! 

Maxton Hall has allllll the tropes. Poor girl, rich boy, private school, enemies to lovers, multiple balls, there’s a dress scene, noble idiocy, and a super villain – Maxton Hall is serving the full menu. The tropes are never the problem for these kinds of stories, we come for the tropes, so I’m not mad when I can see it coming a mile away, but it has to be done well. And this show does it so well! Which, by the way, isn’t easy. It’s often done very badly. So please let’s not disrespect the tropes and how they’re executed. 

The key, of course, is our OTP – Maxton Hall’s main couple are Ruby Bell and James Beaufort, played by Harriet Herbig-Matten and Damian Hardung respectively. She looks like if Alicia Vikander, Julia Ormond, and Victoria Beckham had a baby, with the most adorable two front teeth, and I hope she never changes them. He’s like a young Matt Smith with some of the best hair I’ve seen on television outside of Korea. Together they are magic. THE WAY HE LOOKS AT HER, I swear it accelerated my recovery.

The supporting characters are also excellent, particularly her family. Ruby’s family is the best, they will make you laugh and cry and hug yourself and run through a wall to protect them. Also there’s a chauffeur character, Percy, who is so unnecessarily attractive, I am obsessed. (Much less obsessed with one part of the story that’s a total squick, iykyk, but everything else is just so delicious it’s not hard to push that aside for your enjoyment.) 

Maxton Hall is German …but English? Unclear but unimportant. The only reason I’m telling you this is because the German of it is, in my opinion, why it’s so satisfyingly horny. Those Euros are not as precious about sex on television as North Americans. I’m not saying they’re f-cking every episode, because they’re not, but only because they know how to make you wait for it, draw it out, and that’s part of the fun too, but when they get down to it, they give us what we need. Remember that study that everybody was talking about last year about how Gen Z wants less sex on screen? Liars. Gen Z is popping off over Maxton Hall. The show has broken records for Prime Video, topping charts in 120 countries, and season two is already in production. 

Long weekends are coming up in Canada and then the US. If you haven’t already, enroll at Maxton Hall, and then tell me what you think over at The Squawk. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey