Take a reign check on Hurley and ‘The Royals’

Why isn't "The Royals" better? Wittier? Campier?

All the trappings of a good guilty pleasure are there. Here is another rich family with a compromised reputation and beset with the usual mix of soap opera headaches: blackmail, betrayal, alcoholism, star-crossed romance and infidelity, for starters.

But part of me wishes that E!, in launching its first original scripted series, had hired Jennifer Saunders of "Ab Fab" fame to spice up the satire and the scandal, because the characters introduced in the series premiere this coming Sunday night have a jaded quality that seems so expected it's dull.

The hour kicks off with scenes of a typical weekend for the present-day royal family. Prince Liam (William Moseley) is playing darts at a pub when he is provocatively challenged by an admiring female whom he later beds.

His sister, the princess (Alexandra Park), is out clubbing, exercising enough poor judgment so that when she wakes up the next day, a photograph of whatever bed she stumbled into is splashed on the front page of a British tabloid under the headline "Royal Beaver."

The show, you think, is trying to establish its groove as a shocker when the writers make a risky decision: an expected family crisis puts an end to the fun and we are left having to listen to the ashamed King Simon (Vincent Regan) vowing to ask Parliament to abolish the monarchy in an effort to save his dissolute children.

Huh? Can't we have a little fun with all the adenoidal, entitled stuffed shirts and haughty-yet-dim-witted royal tarts before we start taking the mickey out of them?

The series, created by Mark Schwahn — whose only other major credit, the teen drama "One Tree Hill," naturally raises questions — has a cast almost as large as "Downton Abbey" but with little of the appeal.

As the predictably imperious Queen Helena, Elizabeth Hurley looks fantastically preserved but not especially regal, and her dialogue delivery needs some zing. Park makes Princess Eleanor into the kind of snarling, Amy Winehouse wannabe that you secretly delight in when she meets her match with one of the staff.

Have hangover, will unravel: Alexandra Park as royal mess Princess Eleanor.Photo: Paul Blundell/E! Entertainment

Truly disgusting is the king's brother, a power-hungry rotter with bad skin named Cyrus (Jake Maskall) who's blackmailing married men with sexual favors when he's not using his position to degrade female servants.

"The Royals" wants to shock but can't, since the world it describes is something we know all-too-well from tabloid headlines about the real British royals. These characters are bored by their own jaded lives — and so are we.

And when it tries for romance — as in the "Upstairs/Downstairs" story between Prince Liam and Ophelia, the American daughter of the British head of the palace security detail — it doesn't work either, mainly because actress Merritt Patterson has all the pizzazz of a wedding planner.

"The Royals" has already been renewed for a second season, but the coronation came too early.

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