“The Great,” now streaming on Hulu, is an elegant and bawdy genre-busting history lesson about Catherine the Great.
Over the course of 10 episodes that are stuffed with equal parts witty banter, lofty ideals and brutal debauchery, the series shows how Catherine is transformed from an innocent Austrian princess to the blood-soaked Russian Empress who wants to bring the Enlightenment principles of liberty, art and science to her new country.