PEARSON: Blood and pageantry

Second colorful season of 'Tudors' accelerates sex, violence and heads that roll

By Mike Pearson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Thursday, March 27, 2008

The Tudors

* When and where: 7 p.m. Sunday, Showtime.

While HBO's John Adams brilliantly explores colonial America, Showtime returns to Reformation England on Sunday as it launches the second season of The Tudors with a bang.

Five people are poisoned, there's an assassination plot and one man is boiled in oil. And that's just in the first hour.

During Season 1 we saw the young, handsome Henry Tudor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) become Henry VIII, wed Katherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and take a mistress in Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer).

The season ended with Henry demanding that the Pope annul his marriage to Katherine so he could wed his mistress. When the Vatican balked, Henry threatened to kick the Catholics out of his country and start his own church.

Season 2 of The Tudors picks up where the first left off. An ever more anxious Henry demands that England's bishops confirm him as supreme head of the church. Anne Boleyn grows more petulant as Henry stalls in deciding what to do with Queen Katherine. Anne wants her banished from court; Katherine clings to her rights and refuses to make things easy for Henry.

Meanwhile, political skullduggery continues to infiltrate Henry's court. With his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, now dead, Henry comes into his own as a budding tyrant. He wants his mistress made queen. His wants his old queen gone. And he wants Pope Paul III (Peter O'Toole) to grant him that divorce.

It takes a while for newcomers to get into the flow of The Tudors, but fans of the series will find more of the things they've come to love: political intrigue, sexual shenanigans and pageantry - both costumes and sets.

Since the show follows a historical arc, we know that over the season's 10 episodes Anne will become queen, Henry will become head of the church of England and, eventually, Anne will have her head lopped off when Henry loses interest in her and turns his attention to Jane Seymour.

Creator Michael Hirst's scripts continue to be fluid and dark. His Henry is a man governed by urges rather than logic. He craves absolute power, and as the season progresses he will have it. If that means killing a few people in the process - the real Henry VIII is rumored to have dispatched some 70,000 men and women during the course of his reign - so be it.

In the second season, the cast has warmed to its roles. Meyers makes Henry a man-child who swings between petulance and, well, more petulance. He doesn't like being told "no," and when the Pope refuses his request for an annulment, Henry thinks nothing of breaking with the church. Suddenly he can grant himself a divorce. He doesn't see the obvious: that his subjects love Queen Katherine and despise Anne Boleyn.

Dormer's Boleyn is more complex than history books would have us believe. We know Anne Boleyn as a martyr to the crown. Here she's much more scheming and devious. She's not evil exactly, but she's far from a saint.

And O'Toole is deliciously wry as Pope Paul III. Why, he wonders at one point, doesn't someone just "get rid of" Anne Boleyn and save them all the bother of an excommunication.

Nostalgia tends to render the past in softer shades. Not so The Tudors. It's a pageant of politics and plotting, visually sumptuous and thematically visceral. It'll leave you shaking your head and muttering, "Oh, Henry!"