Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

I don't think anyone could take "The Palace" seriously either as an endorsement or repudiation of Britain's monarchical heritage,but it's certainly jolly good fun and gave everybody a nice break in Lithuania. These aren't the Windsors of course,there's not enough implacable undying animosity and power - crazed egomania on display to even approach our own dear Royal Family,but it's spiffing behind - the -doors stuff that might make one think that there was some inside knowledge obliquely revealed. There's something almost Shakespearian about the plot concerning the sudden death of a king and the manoeuvering of his successors and their various factions in the power vacuum that it causes. But nobody ends up mincemeat - as Cole Porter neatly put it,merely thwarted and retired snarling. None more so that the imperious Miss S.Winkelman,every inch the unregenerate aristo as the oldest child who has the misfortune to be of the wrong gender( a law since removed from the statute books in order to bring the monarchy more in line with the 19th century.) She has the intelligence and beauty to dominate every scene where she appears,and has quite rightly subsequently found her place in Society with a capital "S" by marrying an amiable and unambitious Royal of her own. The other outstanding performance is that of Miss Z.Telfer as the new King's P.A. over whom he exercises the droit de seigneur rather hastily and lives to regret it. "The Palace" isn't great drama but it is great entertainment particularly to those of us who have watched the lives of our Royals lived on the front pages for sixty - odd years with wry amusement and resignation. Life may not always imitate art - but it should perhaps in the case of "The Palace".

'The Palace' is a series that takes place in a fictionalised royal family not so unlike our own; a young king thrown unexpectedly to the throne and who resembles George VI; his sister is a ringer for Princess Margaret, and there are a batch of partying young royals to boot. An ensemble cast also features many of the palace staff, and the tone of the program is somewhere between 'Drop the Dead Donkey' and 'House of Cards', as it follows the ambitions and intrigue surrounding this substantial collection of characters. It's all believable stuff, yet somehow not very interesting: the comedy element is obvious and just not that funny, while the more serious side of the drama fails to engage, the royal family has already lost so much of its mystique that it's hard to feel anything real is at stake in the political games. Stepehen Frears' film 'The Queen', another obvious template, was such fun because of the way it imaginatively interpreted real events and people; but in 'The Palace', none of the made-up royals have sufficient depth to flesh out the plot beyond a skeleton outline. In the end, it's neither subversive or revealing, and fails to contain anything that might not have been predicted; neither true sitcom not true satire, 'The Palace' aims high but ultimately, appears to have nothing of substance to say.

I caught this, a couple of nights ago, and I thought it was great fun. It is kitsch, fluffy and seemingly unrealistic: just what you need after a hard day. There is the young King, who is basically a nice guy trying to do the right thing (but is a duck out of water really). There is the party hard brother, who is a scream; the pantomine villain older sister, who is determined to usurp little bro; and the gin swilling mother. That's just the family, the staff are even more bonkers, from the maids, to the king's assistant, who is supposedly colluding with a journalist to write a 'tell all book'; but you can tell she is developing one hell of a soft spot for HM. This is just good fluffy fun: you can see where the plot is going, but I didn't care because it was perfect glitzy escapism.

From the pre-title sequence to the opening titles themselves, one's first impression of "The Palace" is that it is a series modelled on "The West Wing".Like the aforementioned US political drama, "The Palace" follows the day-to-day lives of a fictional head of state and his staff, but while The West Wing gives almost equal status to each member of its ensemble cast, The Palace is focused, primarily on the show's main character, King Richard and the exploits of his close family.The first episode has clearly set the benchmark for the rest of the series; a series which promises to afford us all a glimpse at an alternative monarchy, which in the case of "The Palace" is personified by a young, charismatic and lad-about-town King, who has been thrust into the glare of the world's press, without warning.ITV1 certainly has the pedigree to produce a series of this calibre, if its recent success with "The Queen" (2006) is anything to judge by and while the series does not allude to portraying real events, certainly promises to be as equally gripping.