Amadeus review: classical music is Bach and better than ever in Sky’s reinvention of scathing rivalry
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A few days before you start watching Amédéean influx of young people flooded my TikTok For You page, playing various Bach pieces on different orchestral instruments while remixing each song with modern music. This was all due to a passing trend, but it briefly made me wonder if classical music was making a resurgence in digital pop culture.
If these same kids watched the new five-part Sky TV series, I think they’d be amazed. Amédée goes far beyond a musical education for the uninitiated, delving deeper into the alleged rivalry between composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri than previous accounts, including Miloš Forman’s 1984 film.
Sky saved its best show of 2025 with Amadeus for last
Look on it
If you look at the YouTube comments on the video above, fans of the original play (by Peter Shaffer) and the subsequent film (directed by Miloš Forman) are not happy that the same story is about to be told. Honestly, I don’t blame them. We can hardly advocate for television and film adaptations that add no cultural value of their own, but I don’t think Amadeus can be tarnished in the same sense.
Even though our previous two versions were impeccable (the three-hour film is far from structurally sound, in my opinion), another adaptation would require adding a new perspective. Lucky for us, that’s exactly what Amédée do.
Without giving too much away, the TV series includes Shaffer’s own journey to writing his play, with the final scene of episode 5 breaking the fourth wall in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen attempted on television. Sky’s creative risk-taking went unnoticed, and the rest of the series is just as ambitious.
Sharpe captures Mozart’s supposedly fiery temperament as if it were the simplest thing in the world, and it is the foundation for the rest of the story’s chaos. No episode can contain the multitude of overflowing emotions, with Salieri’s Mozart (or sometimes both) breaking down, celebrating, or threatening to jump out of a window (this is our unintentionally hilarious opening, so keep your eyes peeled).
Amédée throws everything and the kitchen sink at its storytelling, and the busy environment is almost a character in itself. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that’s the main reason you need to watch it.
Some of our actors have “iPhone faces,” and that’s a problem.
None of this is to say that our main trio isn’t exceptional in their own right. The kudos for our destructive duo are well deserved, with Sharpe and Bettany delivering the performance of their careers. I wonder if Bettany will go out of his way to distance himself from the upcoming Marvel series. VisionQuestbut maybe that’s just me being a cynic when it comes to candor.
While Gabrielle Creevy (Constanze Mozart) hits the right note as a longtime go-between for musical rivals, there’s something about the casting that bothers me. To me, all the younger members (and by that I mean those under about 40) look like they have an “iPhone face”. What I mean by that is, just by looking at them, you can tell they’ve seen an iPhone in their lifetime.
Makeup and costumes Amédée are beautiful, but they do not hide the fact that just by existing, certain actors are too modern. Still, Sharpe particularly surprised me with how astounding his raucous, lewd, and ridiculously arrogant take on Mozart was…I just have to put aside the fact that he clearly knows how WiFi works.
The five-episode series suffers from the classic problem of narrative lag between episodes 3 and 4, but when everything else has such frenetic energy, it’s not hard to ignore. This of course includes music, which Sharped has learned to play (rather than just waving his hands while the camera is cleverly positioned to hide the truth).
As captivating as the scandal, drama and intricacies of 18th-century Viennese society are, it all comes back to the music. It helps us understand the world, the struggles of Mozart and Salieri and ourselves in the process, and it has pushed me to add some conscious additions to my regular Spotify playlists.
Their work is the one for which the two tortured composers ultimately wanted to be remembered, and thanks to Amédée‘ mix of just about everything in their lives, music always comes out on top.
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