Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ On Starz, An Origin Story Of The Couple Scheming Their Way Through French Society

The new Starz series Dangerous Liaisons isn’t a remake of the 1988 film that starred Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer. It’s a prequel of sorts, where an origin story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont is created almost out of whole cloth. How did the two of them become so devious?

DANGEROUS LIAISONS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A scene at the opera, where people are gossiping about lascivious rumors. A woman sits in a private box and thinks back to the letters she wrote a younger lover and the mind-blowing sex they had.

The Gist: In pre-revolution Paris, two young lovers are trying to figure out their future. Camille (Alice Englert) lives in a brothel, and seems to be in an intractable debt to the woman in charge, Madame Jericho (Clare Higgins). Pascal Valmont (Nicholas Denton) is a mapmaker who lost his aristocratic title (and money) when his father left it all to his stepmother, Ondine de Valmont (Colette Dalal Tchantcho). He proposes to Camille, promising to pay off her debt to Jericho however he can.

His way to do that is to seduce aristocratic women like Genevieve de Merteuil (Lesley Manville), whose lust-filled letters to Pascal are his leverage to get the title and money he feels he deserves; if he doesn’t do it, he’ll send them to her husband.

Victoire (Kosar Ali) a maid at the brothel and Camille’s best friend, thinks that Pascal is up to no good. After agreeing to marry him, Camille finds one of the letters Pascal is holding, and he tells her about his plan to gain his standing via those letters. She doubts him at first but then believes him; they set to meet the next night. But when Pascal’s houseboy Azolan (Nathanael Saleh) gets a note from another woman he’s been extorting, Pascal is derailed.

Camille gains leverage after Victoire overhears Pascal tell her friend about the letters, and she goes to his office and finds them. They go straight to the Marquise de Merteuil; in exchange for the letters, Camille wants Genevieve to make her into an aristocrat. Genevieve, sympathetic to the pain Camille must be going through, wants to teach her how to take the power she deserves in a society that is designed to keep women down.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Based on the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, the TV version of Dangerous Liaisons goes over the beginnings of how Camille and Valmont became the devious on-again, off-again couple that was depicted in the 1988 film of the same name. Of course, the modernized version of this story was the 1999 film Cruel Intentions.

Our Take: Creator Harriet Warner and her writers imagined this origin story for the versions of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont we see in the films and de Laclos’ novel, based on a letter in the novel where Camille talks about how she made herself into the scheming aristocrat in the story.

It’s quite the inventive way to bring these well known characters to life once again; make them young and initially in love, until Camille finds out exactly what Pascal is up to. Englert and Denton show that initial chemistry in those scenes where the two are madly in love, and Warner’s story makes things pretty clear about how things went so wrong. There’s no misunderstanding or miscommunication; Pascal loses out on Camille due to his greed, no matter how he may have really felt about her.

What we appreciated is the unambiguous way this first episode lays out the story. There’s not a ton of extraneous characters and the motivations of both Camille and Valmont are clear. Valmont wants to return to the status that was taken away from him, whereas Camille just wants to get out of her rough lot in life. When she appeals to Genevieve to put her in a position to wield some leverage, she says, “I’ve seen wealth and power, what it can do. How it can protect,” which just adds intrigue to her back story.

But the players, at least at the beginning of this prelude story, are pretty clear, something we don’t always see in bodice-ripping costume dramas like this; if we can see past the wigs and the corsets and the scenery and really see the characters for who they are in a period drama, that’s a good sign for the rest of the series.

Sex and Skin: Lots of simulated sex and lots of skin, including from Manville, who might be the sexiest member of the cast.

Parting Shot: Gabriel Carrè (Hilton Pelser), a morality officer who approached Camille for a relationship right before she left to meet Valmont, talks to a priest on how evil will befall her, as we cut to a scene of a newly-coiffed Camille enjoying her first opera with Genevieve.

Sleeper Star: Kosar Ali brings some gritty energy as Victoire, and her interactions with Valmont are as raw as it gets in a setting where everyone sounds utterly polite to each other.

Most Pilot-y Line: As he argues with his stepmother about getting what he deserves from his father’s estate, he leans in and seemingly sniffs her shoulder as she talks about how much more loved her son was by her husband. Is he going to try to seduce his stepmother, too?

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s hard to create a new story for 230-year-old characters and make it seem like it was part of those characters’ stories the whole time. But Harriet Warner and her staff have been able to do that with Dangerous Liaisons.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.