Tudors gets ye olde third season

Showtime has announced that its historical drama, The Tudors, has been picked up for a third season. The drama's in the middle of its second season; in the third go-round, which airs in 2009, Henry VIII will wed Jane Seymour and Anne Cleves.

The biggest question about The Tudors: When will Henry start to resemble his portly portraits of old? He's still pretty lean and mean in the saucy Showtime version, which stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers. I guess since this is cable TV, Henry will be forever sexy, trim and dissolute.

Too bad they didn't get Jane Seymour to play the ill-fated royal wife Jane Seymour. Actress Anita Briem fills that role.

Showtime's Tuesday release is below:

A ROYAL DECREE FOR SEASON THREE!

SHOWTIME’s THE TUDORS GETS 3RD SEASON PICK-UP

New Season Follows King Henry as He Weds Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves

LOS ANGELES, CA – (April 22, 2008) – As episode six of THE TUDORS’ second season debuts this coming Sunday on SHOWTIME, the network is ramping up for a third season of palace intrigue and royal drama, premiering in 2009. Production is slated to begin on June 16th in Dublin, Ireland with series star Jonathan Rhys Meyers set to return.

THE TUDORS took SHOWTIME subscribers and the media by storm when it premiered in April 2006, generating record viewership and critical acclaim. Last year, both the series and Rhys Meyers earned Golden Globe® nominations. And, season one of THE TUDORS is currently one of CBS Home Entertainment’s top-selling titles.

“THE TUDORS is now a fixture for us at SHOWTIME and we’re on our way to completing the entire saga of all six wives of Henry VIII,” says SHOWTIME President of Entertainment Robert Greenblatt. “We are enormously proud of this show, the extraordinary cast, and the production team that recreates the grandeur of the Renaissance year in and year out. There is nothing like this anywhere on American television.”

Viewers and critics alike have been enthralled watching the storied exploits of the sexy, hard-bodied King Henry VIII (Rhys Meyers) as he weds Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer) while working to declare his marriage invalid to Queen Katherine (Maria Doyle Kennedy). This prompts Pope Paul III (Peter O'Toole) to have him excommunicated -- a fall-out that changed the course of history. Anne’s failure to deliver a male heir sets the wheels in motion for her beheading, and sends Henry straight into the arms of yet another prospect – Jane Seymour (Anita Briem), who dies from an infection after finally giving him his coveted male heir.

THE TUDORS is an Ireland-Canada co-production, executive produced by Morgan O’Sullivan for Octagon Films; Benjamin Silverman and Teri Weinberg for Reveille Productions; Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan for Working Title Films, and Sheila Hockin; and is created, written and executive produced by Michael Hirst. SHOWTIME presents the series in association with Peace Arch Entertainment.

Nasty, but not so brutish and short

In its depiction of the early reigning years of Henry VIII, The Tudors, which returns on Sunday for its second somnolent season on Showtime, plays a game of historical hopscotch. Timelines are abbreviated, papacies are rearranged, and while the show’s creators have adequately defended these practices as a means of narrative efficiency, they have yet to be held accountable for producing a version of Tudor England that appears to have been spritzed with Febreze, observes Ginia Bellafante.

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.

The Tudors is on Showtime, Sunday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time

Further reading: Sexy Henry VIII needs no codpiece

The royal life (some facts altered)

For a guy playing Henry VIII, Jonathan Rhys Meyers was looking very skinny in his jeans relaxing in a trailer on the Irish set of Showtime’s steamy period drama The Tudors, reports Anita Gates...

The series, which critics could take or leave but many viewers are eating up (the costumes! the sets! the sex scenes!), returns for its second season next Sunday. “I have got absolutely no physical attributes in common with Henry VIII,” Mr. Rhys Meyers acknowledged as he made tea. “So everything has to be more about his energy, more about power, more about confidence.” He had just filmed a scene set shortly before Henry and Anne Boleyn’s wedding, which history tells us took place when the king was in his early 40s. Mr. Rhys Meyers is 30. “Henry is 30,” too, this season, he said with a playful gleam in his eye. “He’s going to stay 30 for a while.” He will also stay slim, although Mr. Rhys Meyers has been eating voraciously to put on a few royal pounds. “You don’t want to see a skinny guy in a big fat suit,” he said. “Unless it’s Eddie Murphy."

The king’s physical appearance may be a minor point, really, when you consider the historical facts that The Tudors have played fast and loose with. And Michael Hirst, the show’s creator and writer, will defend every single decision. “Showtime commissioned me to write an entertainment, a soap opera, and not history,” said Mr. Hirst, taking a break in an office at Ardmore Studios, near Dublin. “And we wanted people to watch it.” It seems there have been practical movie-making reasons for the misrepresentations. Take Henry’s sisters. In Season 1 Gabrielle Anwar played one, Princess Margaret, who marries an older man, the King of Spain, against her will. As any number of Internet history buffs will tell you, it was Henry’s other sister, Mary, who did that, and the older man was the King of France. So didn’t the writer do his research?

As it turns out, Mr. Hirst was well aware of both facts. But the list of characters already included a Princess Mary, Catherine of Aragon’s little daughter. “I didn’t want two Princess Marys on the call sheet,” he said, because it might have confused the crew. “ ‘Which one do you mean, Michael? Who do we dress?’ ” As for Margaret/Mary’s husband, The Tudors had shown a French king in a different context in Season 1. Mr. Hirst feared that viewers might be confused, so he just chose another European country.

Liberties were also taken with the death of Thomas Wolsey, archbishop of York and the king’s right-hand man. According to historians Wolsey fell ill and died in Leicester in 1530 on his way back to London to face charges of treason. In Season 1 Wolsey committed suicide there, despite religious strictures against it. Mr. Hirst defends his decision, contending that this might have been the way things really happened, and that Henry would have covered it up. Wolsey certainly had motive. “He was going to come back to a show trial,” Mr. Hirst said. “And the best that he could get would have been a public beheading in front of all his enemies and a jubilant crowd.” Mr. Hirst also wanted to give an acclaimed actor, Sam Neill, a powerful scene: “I didn’t want him to go out with a whimper. I wanted him to go out with a bang.”

History will continue to be altered in Season 2, beginning with Pope Paul III, played by Peter O'Toole. The pope who refused to let Henry divorce his first wife and excommunicated him was Paul’s predecessor, Clement VII. But last season Clement, played by Ian McElhinney, had a few short scenes. Mr. Hirst worried that viewers might remember and react negatively to the casting change, so he just set up a papal succession. But in reality by the time Paul III was elected, in October 1534, Catherine was long gone, and Henry and Anne had been married roughly a year and a half. Mr. Hirst decided that any confusion created by the changes is outweighed by the interest the series may inspire in the period and its figures. To that end, he wants to emphasize the similarity to the current era. “I mean, who is Henry but a man who’s married to an older woman who falls in love with a younger one and wants to marry her?” Mr. Hirst asked. “We’ve seen that.”

Natalie Dormer, who plays Anne, found it easy to see her as a contemporary. She said there were strong likenesses between her character and a more recent British royal beauty: Diana, Princess of Wales. “They were both incredibly image conscious,” said Ms. Dormer, 26, who was sitting in a dressing room, wearing a 16th-century-style ivory dress. “Anne Boleyn shook up the court in an aesthetic way.” Just like Diana, who used glamour to court the news media, Ms. Dormer said, Anne made it clear that she was bringing “a certain je ne sais quoi, a sophistication” to the court. So far, the historical Anne and the Showtime Anne have not noticeably diverged. (She really did contract and survive what was known as the sweating sickness.) But anything can happen.

Anne will do historically accurate things, like marrying Henry, giving birth to a daughter (the future Elizabeth I), losing her husband to Jane Seymour and losing her head to the executioner. The season will also bring Thomas More’s fall from grace, which really occurred. Just the other day Mr. Hirst swore that there would be no further historical adjustments this season, at least nothing significant that he could think of. Oh, except the plot to kill Anne Boleyn. He invented that to illustrate how much the English people hated her.

Season two of The Tudors airs at 9pm on March 30th, Showtime

Further reading: Playing king; More comes into play on Tudors