Beyond theological fissures and the dramatic restructuring of feudal economies, life in England during the 16th century continued to be distinguished by a stench no modern nose could easily sustain. “Even in the goodliest and stateliest palaces of our realm,” John Harington wrote in 1596 about his invention of an early flush toilet, “still this same whoreson saucy stink.” No matter how much sex The Tudors has given us — Henry’s behaviour as if a member of the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. proceeds unabated this season — it is a show that never gets quite dirty enough. Last season it contained the devastations of the plague more or less to a single episode, the camera passing over the night-blue faces of beautiful women taken too young — the Black Death as a fashion shoot you would find in Italian Vogue. Henry, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, lived in consuming terror of the disease, working himself into an expedient perspiration every time he felt the slightest bit woozy or unwell. One scene had him waking in the middle of the night to do push-ups and jog ferociously in shorts in his chambers, his perfectly demarcated abdominals and deltoids exposed so that he looked like someone you would hire to be your live-in personal trainer.
The Tudors has always struggled to calibrate a tone, both aural and visual, that might feel true to its period without seeming absurdly anachronistic. The show lets modernity blaze through in the form of implausibly well-groomed faces; Henry shifts from regal formal locutions to outbursts that make him seem like the ornery head of a construction company, and the effect is disorienting, as if you’re seeing someone at a memorial service in clothing exclamatory or garish. The current season has Henry dividing his considerable energy between the beds of his new wife, Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer) and her various ladies in waiting, one of whom Anne selects for him. The plot having been hijacked by his failed struggle to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon from the Roman Catholic Church, Henry marries Anne in secret. He seems to be drawn with even less complexity now; he isn’t charismatically dislikable, he is plainly odious. We find him refusing a Christmas gift from Katherine (Maria Doyle Kennedy) once he has solidified his union with Anne.
Given that the writers don’t hold themselves to standards of strict historical accuracy, they might have asked themselves: What would Tony Soprano have done? He would not have sent back a chalice or a holiday panettone, especially not to a woman who still loved him, no matter the depths of enmity. Mr. Rhys Meyers, who showed such a talent for displays of moral enigma in Woody Allen’s Match Point, seems to have been asked to keep all that dimension to himself here.
If The Tudors fails to live up to the great long-form dramas cable television has produced, it is not simply because it refuses the visceral messiness of a Rome or a Deadwood (the corpse-eating pigs!) but more significantly because it radically reduces the era’s thematic conflicts to simplistic struggles over personal and erotic power. The Tudors makes it seem as if the entire creation of the Anglican Church boiled down to Henry’s wish to remarry and sire a male heir. (When Anne gives birth to a daughter this season, the future Elizabeth I, Henry looks as if he were a little boy who got the wrong kind of tricycle at Christmas.) The Sopranos, The Wire and Big Love all have derived their potency from dramatizing the preservation of failing institutions. The paradox of The Tudors is that it takes on one of the most powerful and protested institutions in human history — the Catholic Church during the Renaissance — and provides little sense of what the English people have to gain or lose by breaking with it.
Peter O’Toole arrives this season as Pope Paul III, playing him as a drawing-room wit, a delicious performance that only serves to mitigate further any sense of the papacy’s hegemony. Henry VIII was a man of extreme faith who attended Mass five times a day. Watching The Tudors you’d think he spent most of that time shaving.
Further reading: Sexy Henry VIII needs no codpiece
