Showtime's The Borgias – Kill the Characters not the Monkey

Last night, I watched the soporific 2-hour premier of Showtime’s the Borgia.The show begins with Innocent VIII’s deathbed scene- a man guilty of enough simony (not to mention his countless bastards) to land him in Dante’s 8th circle of hell. Innocent asks his cardinals to clean up their act and make the church respectable again. Now, a new Pope must be chosen. Ok. we were off to a good start. 

But half way through the first two episodes, and somewhere between feeling like I was being walled up in a Papal conclave and wishing for the darn smoke to turn white so something would happen in this mind-numbing plot line…I realized that I simply did not care about these characters. Unlike the Godfather, (the movie the producers supposedly intended to emulate) there isn’t a single redeeming quality about any of the family members. In fact, I am pretty sure that I felt more sorry for Cesare’s taster monkey that bites it in the first episode.

And I don’t even like monkeys.

The main character, Rodrigo Borgia is over-simplified to the point of being obnoxious. Cesare Borgia is a peevish brat without a conscience.  The vapid Lucrezia’s biggest desire is to be painted with an exotic beast. The entire family comes across as a bunch of thugs with a singular desire– power. It’s the singular part that turns into a real snooze fest. For such a talented cast, they weren't given much to work with. While shows like the Sopranos have multi-layered characters with multi-layered desires, the Borgias are reduced to a bunch of one-liners. In the Sopranos, we are horrified by Tony Sopranos’ unscrupulous actions, but he is still a very human character. We feel his guilt when he sits in that psychiatrist’s chair. And when Jonathan Rhys Myers flashes his psycho eyes in The Tudors, I may giggle now and then, but I still feel his character torn between his own desires and the desires of his family and the church. These characters were all very human with human wants and human cares. The Borgias' dead monkey seems to have more feeling. 

The most frustrating part is that the real history had tons for viewers to care about. Alexander VI, despite his moral ineptitude, loved his children to death and was willing to destroy everything the peace of Lodi had established to protect them. In Showtime’s The Borgia, Alexander doesn’t seem to give a bag of figs for his sons or his daughter. He admonishes Cesare like an overworked father and has very little interaction with Lucrezia.

Where are the family factions splitting political lines? The Sforza, the Visconti, the Colonna, the Orsini, and most importantly the Medici? Did the producers really need to spend an entire episode on showing just how corrupt Alexander was? And where is Savanarola with his fire and brimstone sermons and his child messengers? Where is Ludovico Sforza and his machinations with the French –inviting the devil to his doorstep to crush his enemies in Naples only to have the serpent turn on him. Now THERE is a powerful story. 

I think Michelangelo sums up perfectly the atmosphere in Rome that the Borgias took two hours too long to establish.

Here they make helmets and swords out of chalices,

And they sell the blood of Christ by handfuls,

And cross and thorns are lances and shields

And even Christ all patience loses.

But let him come no more to these city streets,

For here his blood would flow up to the very stars,

Now that in Rome they sell his skin

And they have closed the roads to all goodness…

Perhaps Michelangelo saw what the producers of the Borgias missed – that a story stripped of humanity truly is a road closed to all goodness.  It’s this redeeming goodness that the Borgia is missing. Mario Puzo's The Godfathers succeeded not because it had “Sex. Power. Murder. Amen,” but because in their Machiavellian pursuit of power they were still just a family that loved each other and were willing to die for each other. Unfortunately, the Borgias love their family as much as their monkeys.

I REALLY wanted to like the Borgia. Now, I only have watched the first two episodes so perhaps this is just a slow start and the series will get there. But so far...it's just not coming together for me. But I would love to hear what others thought. Personally, I am really enjoying Camelot (Produced by the Michael Hirst - the same producer as The Tudors.) so I am getting my history fix.