Why The Tudors Is Kinda Good

If you know anything about Showtime's The Tudors you know that it is...rather trashy. It has been maligned by critics, fashion historians, and regular historians. But having recently re-watched it, and watched it alongside Wolf Hall, I am ready to make the case that it is, at times, actually good.

First, to recap why The Tudors gets a bad rap, and why it is mostly deserved:

The pitch meeting for the show seems to be: History, but make it SEXY. And this being the 2000s, SEXY meant that all the actors are all young and hot, the clothes are all ready to fall off at any moment, and there are lots of sex scenes that are gratuitous and unrelated to the plot. The show tries to aggressively sell everyone on Jonathan Rhys Meyers as hot beefcake Henry VIII and he mostly comes across as gross.

He enjoys aggressively and sensually eating fruit for some reason

The costumes are frequently hilarious, but I particularly enjoy how they keep trying to find ways to show off Henry's body even in scenes where he isn't having sex. Like, how about he is with his tailor and his tailor hasn't put sleeves on his doublet yet, but then he is angry so has to have a big important argument without sleeves?

 

So hot

In summary: Henry VIII is HOT and has SEX and everyone in his court has SEX and it is all just so HOT.

You get the idea

But the other thing is that it is still a multi-episode television show. Each episode is an hour and the Anne Boleyn story is stretched out for two 10-episode seasons. So that is 20 hours to fill and it can't be 20 hours of Jonathan Rhys Meyers ripping his shirt off.

Some of that time has to be filled with actual historical events and details of Henry's reign. Sure, there is stuff that is totally made up or wildly stretched, but some of it is actually accurate. And historical figures who are usually flattened down to a few basic traits in a movie retelling, get more screen time and stuff to do.

Take for example the two women at the center of the story: Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn.  Queen Catherine is usually depicted as either stoic and saintly or dried up and stubborn. Anne Boleyn is either slutty and conniving or romantic and heroic. In The Tudors Catherine is shown as strong and pious, but also savvy about the politics of the court and knows how to play her hand. Anne Boleyn is calculating and power-hungry at times, but she also is shown as vulnerable and aware that she is being played as a pawn for her family's own ambitions. She is sympathetic to the Protestant church but also argues with Cromwell about money from the monasteries going to the needy instead of into Henry's pocket. Gosh, maybe women are full human beings with complex emotions and motivations?!

In a similar vein are Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. In most versions of the Henry VIII story, More is a hero and Cromwell a villain. More, a great scholar and thinker of the time, felt his conscience wouldn't allow him to support Henry's marriage to Anne. He was tried and executed as a traitor. There is understandable respect for him and he was even sainted by the Catholic Church. In The Tudors he is played by Jeremy Northam so he is principled AND attractive.

Mmmm.

But The Tudors also shows us his less palatable side-- like when he was Chancellor he jumped at the opportunity to burn as many Protestants as possible.

The non-sexy kind of hot

Then there is Thomas Cromwell, who is usually viewed as an opportunist who had no problem doing Henry's dirty work. In The Tudors he is a major character for three seasons, so he gets a lot of screen time. He is clever and capable, sympathetic to the Protestant cause, zealously against aspects of the Catholic church, eager to please Henry, and not terribly afraid of making enemies. Again, they cast an actor (James Frain) who is much younger and more attractive than the real Cromwell.

Dark curly hair yes please

While doing some googling I found this article by a Cromwell biographer who begrudgingly admits that The Tudors is the most accurate portrayal of Cromwell on screen. Her reasoning is that the real Cromwell was quite complicated, not fully hero or villain (as it true for most people) and The Tudors came closest to showing that.

Ok, so I mentioned Wolf Hall earlier. If you don't know, Wolf Hall is the name of both a novel by Hilary Mantel and a miniseries made by the BBC (which was actually an adaptation of both Wolf Hall and the second book Bring up the Bodies. The last book The Mirror and the Light was just published). Mantel positions Cromwell as the hero of the story and makes him very charming and sympathetic. Both book and miniseries are FANTASTIC and I'm sort of obsessed.

If he loves cats, how bad can he be?

While historians may quibble about how favorably Mantel portrays Cromwell, everyone agrees that her books are painstakingly researched and evocative of the Tudor period. But watching The Tudors back-to-back with Wolf Hall highlighted how surprisingly historical much of The Tudors actually was--it just got lost under so much schlock.

So to summarize, The Tudors isn't so bad, Wolf Hall is amazing, and I maybe have a crush on Thomas Cromwell.