Aging Disgracefully

By contrast, The Tudors is at the very beginning of its dramatic product cycle. It opens late in the marriage of Henry VIII (played ably by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) to Catherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy). Henry is a arrogant and immature playboy with little grasp of his larger responsibilities or his own mortality. To the extent that he focuses at all on his kingly duties, it is the part about siring an heir. For the most part, he focuses on bastard children whose claim to the throne would be tenuous at best (having long ago abandoned Catherine's bed out of exasperation over her inability to produce a boy). Implicitly, the fault for his lack of a male heir lies in his mind with the women with whom he slept. The notion of a common denominator apparently had not been developed as of Henry's time (when one considers the enormous number of women he slept with against the narrow range of legitimate and illegitimate offspring resulting, one must conclude Henry had some kind of fertility problem). Looking at Doyle Kennedy, my own solution would have been to try harder with her. Much, much harder.

The Tudors is certainly beautifully photographed and worth watching on that basis alone. The cast is brilliant, and turns in superb performances (as I explain below, one problem with Rhys-Meyers Henry VIII is the he may be just a bit too spot on). The Tudors is well written and, compared with HBO's period drama Rome, hews closer to the historical record (though, as noted below, this may not be a relative strength). Finally, I have to admit that the opening theme music is beautiful, and difficult to get out of one's head (watch the YouTube clip below).

Against these strengths, The Tudors is ultimately slightly unsatisfying, and certainly compares unfavorably to the recently concluded Rome. To begin with, there is no real emotional connection to the larger context (in a number of respects) that its various characters inhabit. This is a serious problem for any historical drama wishing to engage anyone beyond the soap opera crowd.

"You think you know a story, but you only know how it ends; to get to the heart of a story you have to go back to the beginning" Rhys-Meyers' Henry VIII purrs in the course of the opening credits. But from the very first episode, this silly line shows up a serious problem with Showtime's tale of Henry VIII: it doesn't start from the beginning. On the most obvious level, for a series called "The Tudors" to make a respectable showing of starting from the beginning, one would at a minimum open with Henry Tudor's climb to power (and think of the plot intrigue the waning days of the Wars of the Roses might have offered!). Indeed, it doesn't even take us to beginning of Henry VIII's story: we meet him long into his marriage within Catherine of Aragon, and the deeper fault lines extending from his past are alluded to only in passing, in a fashion that does not effectively integrate them into his present psyche ("I am being punished for marrying my brother's wife" and "I am squandering all of my father's hard work!" are about the extent of it). Perhaps this is true to history, and there was little else to Henry VIII. But does he then really merit a historical drama of this sort?

More importantly, at the dramatic level The Tudors essentially fails to complete the wiring connecting the private emotional struggles of its characters to the larger tensions of their time. Henry VIII lived at a moment when the medieval world was truly beginning to come undone institutionally (the jousting could be viewed as the 16th century frat boy's appeal to a simpler time) and the religious order that had guided the West through the Dark Ages was beginning to falter politically and religiously. These developments would help to sow the seeds of the upheavals of the coming centuries, ruptures that would, among other things, lead to the French, American and Industrial Revolutions. There is little if any attempt to place the story within this larger context, and the few forays made in this direction are clumsy and have a knock-on sort of feel (as with Henry's exchanges with Martin Luther).

By contrast, Rome was, in a fairly unconcious (ie with minimal overt pre-amble), smooth and convincing fashion able to root its characters in their chaotic age, making the story far richer for being far messier. Titus Pullo, Lucius Vorenus, Atia of the Julii, etc. lived at an electric and unsettling moment of history: an ancient Republic that had been largely stable and incredibly successful by many measures was coming unglued. An increasingly fractious Senate was simply unable to meet the evolving needs of an emerging world power whose cultural diversification was challenging old and strongly-felt notions of identity. The Senate no longer served the broader needs of Rome, but instead with time had increasingly embraced its aristocratic foundations (rendering Rome a more and more narrow oligarchy). Ordinary Romans no longer had a stake in dysfunctional Republican institutions, and instead were coming to identify with charismatic strong-men such as Caesar and Pompey the Great who effectively circumvented traditional Republican channels to appeal directly to the masses.

Clearly, one world (the Republic) was ending while a new one (the more executive Imperial society) was emerging. We were watching Pullo, Vorenus, Cicerco and all try to find their bearings in a landscape so fractured by economic, political and social upheaval that the old and sure pathways on which their fathers had depended were no longer evident. In short, their private tribulations were effectively framed within, and psychologically enriched (to the benefit of the audience) by, the struggle to find their way in a frightening and confusing new world.

The Tudors also fall's short of Rome's standard in terms of finding some emotional common ground with modern day America. In part, this may simply reflect historical reality: modern America, particularly in its messy problems and expansive ambitions, might more closely resemble Caesar's Rome than Tudor England. There was an immediacy to the trials and tribulations of the characters in Rome in part because the problems confronting their society were so similar. The series opened with a controversial foreign war in Gaul that the militarily determined Caesar had essentially waged with no clear mandate from the Senate. Roman society was terrified about the loss of identity in an increasingly multicultural world (as the poor of the world flocked to her bright lights) and the hollowing of traditional economic arrangements (as, for instance, peasants were displaced from the land and hordes of slaves were brought to Italy from the conquered territories). And more and more citizens from all levels of society were wondering if her corrupt and cumbersome democratic institutions could meet any of these challenges. At the private level, they also fretted about the erosion of mos maiorum and the fabric of Roman culture (at one point, Kevin McKidd's Lucius Vorenus suggests angrily and mournfully that "such failure to respect the Gods is what has brought us to this sad pass"). Sound by analogy like any modern society you know?

Tudor England was a different story. Or maybe it wasn't. In any case Showtime doesn't attempt to make a persuasive case either way. The messiness and fundamental fault lines and upheavals of Tudor England are relegated to the sidelines in a series that spends most of its time focusing on the interpersonal struggles of the elite few within the ornate and insulated walls of places like Hampton Court, and little in the bustling streets of London. You don't meet characters drawn from the larger social context, and hence feel little connection to it. I think that you need a Titus Pullo or Lucius Vorenus as a vehicle for allowing the upheavals of everyday society to spill into the manicured gardens of the elite. Ironically enough, the presence of these commoners somehow made the conflicts between the elite seem like something more than an exceptionally violent round of the usual cursus honorum. Without them, Rome would likely have devolved into Dallas or Dynasty in period dress.

Unfortunately, The Tudors has pretty much gone that route from the outset. It is a story of superficial court intrigue, but little else. For instance, the historical Henry VIIIs constant fear of renewed civil war was probably a central motivation for many of his otherwise baffling personal choices, but because the series did not first embrace the waning days of the Wars of the Roses, we have little sense of this and the attempts to implant such an awareness by the writers seem clumsy and emotionally unconvincing. To offer this more complete picture, the producers of The Tudors might have studied the way that Rome deftly maneuvered the story across long intervals of time (the first season feels as if it took place over perhaps a year while covering a historical story that actually took place across eight years).

The Tudors also suffers by comparison for its lack of really compelling female characters. So far, Henry's sister Margaret, wife Catherine and Anne Boleyn have occupied the most dramatic real-estate. Unfortunately, none of them holds a candle to the ladies of Rome, particularly the politically and sexually fierce Atia of the Julii, a fictional character based on a very effective amalgamation of the real-life Atia Balba Caesonia (the chaste but ambitious Roman matron who nonetheless questioned the political career of her son Octavian) and Fulvia Bambaliae (Mark Antony's wife, and the Lady MacBeth of her age), and her coldly calculating antagonist Servilia. Atia is probably the only woman, real or fictional, that I have ever encountered who could have wholly and truly seduced me while at the same time scaring the ever-living shit out of me. Unfortunately, none of the women of The Tudors so resonates with me or, I suspect, other viewers. Why, for instance, did the writers decide to stick to the conventional (though no longer universally accepted by historians) "Catherine of Aragon as pious victim" characterization? I wanna see Doyle Kennedy show what she's made of: with her dark beauty matched by those dark and severe period dresses I know there has to be the possibility of an Atia of the Julii in their somewhere!

Indeed, The Tudors does not even develop many of its male characters particularly well, and instead rests more or less wholly on Rhys-Meyers' immature narcissist of a monarch. That, I suspect, is simply too narrow a foundation on which to build such a series.

Finally, by hewing more closely to the historical record (at least so far), The Tudors strangely offers the less persuasive historical story on a dramatic level. We are fascinated by times of Julius Caesar and the Tudors. How many play, stories, novels and movies have taken those eras as their settings? They represent ideal moments for story-telling because they were inhabited by larger-than-life characters just sufficiently filled in by the historical record to render them real but still sufficiently shrouded in the mysts of time to create rich scope for poetic license. It would seem that Rome took much better advantage of this opportunity than The Tudors. By bollixing the details in such a creatively useful fashion, Rome probably did a far better job capturing the emotional essence of her moment within the artistic constraints of the small screen.