The Boleyns: A Scandalous Family

After Channel five's abomination of The Anne Boleyn story, I was expecting great things from this BBC drama documentary.

All in all, it's pretty good, it's very practical, very informative, it provides you with lots of facts, and historically accurate information about the whole of the family, in particular the rise and fall of Anne.

I loved the accuracy of the info, I was less than impressed by the drama elements, at times it looked a little bit cheap, The BBC are renowned for their costume dramas, but this unfortunately doesn't cut the mustard.

Watchable, informative, just wanted a bit more from it, 6/10.

This is almost unbearable to watch, and I could not get through the first episode. The talking heads are completely unnecessary and offer no insight at all, delivery trite social comments that are hardly considered opinion. I do begin to wonder about the worth of these programmes in capturing the historical fact ; it would be far better to have a miniseries , like the White Queen that blended historical fact with creative licence - but heck at least it was interesting. This dribble is unwatchable.

Excellent series about a family at the very heart of the English Reformation.

It is not about the drama, it is about the commentary.

Experts include Oxford's finest, the excellent Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of church history.

What's with the people putting down this show? Okay, they filmed it at the proper location(s), they probably found the actors who looked (sort of) like the real persons. Okay, so they added some juicy stuff to it (to make it more interesting). The truth is, everyone who rated this show so badly could not have personally have done half as good as this.

The experts who were interviewed seemed to know what they were talking about. Half of them I am sure live at those locations, too (too spooky for me though), but it's like being a fly on the wall, and to witness these people, makes a very interesting story.

Have seen it more than once, and I find it very enjoyable!

There's plenty of inaccurate history in this miniseries. Anne Boleyn's time in France was touched upon but the fact that her older sister Mary was also part of the French court is not touched upon at all. Mary Boleyn had a reputation as a person of uncertain virtue. Not only did she become Henry VIII's mistress, but she was also rumored to have slept with the French king so the portrayal of her as an unwilling mistress is entirely false. Even the portrayal of Anne as "beautiful" was false. She was considered to be fairly plain: she had a sallow complexion and dark hair and a bosom "not much raised" at a time when women of fair coloring were considered to represent the ideal of beauty.

Many pivotal figures are not represented here. What happened to Thomas Moore and Jane Rochfort for example?

I hoped for more historical accuracy.