'The Seduction' Rewrites a Masterpiece

There are no heroes in Les Liaisons dangereuses , Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel of cold-blooded decadence in the same French court that would be violently overthrown a few years after its publication in 1782. Chief among its villains is Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil, a master manipulator who takes advantage of her former lover Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont’s resurgent desire for her with a wager that ultimately dooms them both. As a teenage Fiona Apple dryly noted: “It’s a sad, sad world when a girl will break a boy just because she can.”

The Seduction , HBO Max’s first French-language series and approximately the millionth onscreen iteration of Laclos’s masterwork, imagines just what that world might entail. (The premiere is streaming now, with subsequent episodes arriv