Have you watched The Tudors yet? Because you should.

I happened across episode 7 of The Tudors on Saturday afternoon and found it amusing. Frinklin offered to sit down and watch the first episode (thanks to Comcast's On Demand feature) with me, and holy crap - we were hooked! We watched half the available episodes and didn't get to bed until almost 3 AM. Sunday afternoon saw us finishing off the nine On Demand shows and frantically searching for the 10th episode season finale (episode 8 just aired, and the 10th isn't yet scheduled).

It's not that the show is so overwhelmingly good, like some cable series; it's that the show is so awesomely trashy and sexy, it makes for excellent fun to watch. Take one-part history and one-part soap opera, throw in a dash of spicy sex and blend.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is fantastic as a young, fiery King Henry VIII, demanding respect and obedience while bedding numerous women. Sam Neill is the slimy Cardinal Wolsey with his own ambitions. Jeremy Northam's Sir Thomas Moore as the picture of sanity and reasoning until the Lutherans start to piss him off (he's about to unleash some whup-ass in the form of burning people at the stake in the 10th episode). And I have to mention Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, played by super-molten-hot Henry Cavill, who rivals Henry for the number of women slept with.

There are also the excellent women in the cast; Natalie Dormer as (so far) terrible tease Anne Boleyn, Maria Doyle Kennedy as the sad and pious Queen Katherine, and Gabrielle Anwar as Princess Margaret (as a composite of Henry's two older sisters). There's a lot of heaving bosoms all around, and I like my bosoms to heave.

While The Tudors won't win any award for historical accuracy, it does provide an interesting look at young King Henry VIII's court. With several of the main characters already dead from various diseases and one beheading, I'm interested to see how long the story telling can be sustained without completely abandoning the historical time-line. The show has already been renewed, with the second season taking on Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn.

Posted by: Ensie at 04:36 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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