"Seeing yourself on screen is a beautiful thing, even if you need subtitles."ry couple of years, I re-watch the first one-and-a-half seasons of Showtime’s The Tudors, a deeply stupid show for which I nonetheless retain a perverse nostalgic fondness. The sets and landscapes are beautiful, the soundtrack is all subtly muzak’d versions of medieval dance tunes, and the episode scripts are replete with exquisite moments, such as Henry VIII saying “I hate time itself” while gesturing weakly at an astrolabe. The leading men have modern haircuts and look like British footballers at a half-assed fancy dress party. There are a lot of deeply likeable grifters to root for: from Sam Neill’s Cardinal Wolsey, constantly torn between his ambition to be pope and his need to take a goddamn nap, to Natalie Dormer’s Anne Boleyn, who is so contemptuously beautiful that “inventing a fake religion” honestly feels like a proportionate seduction tactic. Most delightfully of all, despite the showrunners’ best efforts to make everything as sexy as possible, the characters still have to spend a significant amount of time standing in front of mullioned windows reciting Wikipedia articles about theological conflicts in order to keep the plot moving forward. It’s great fucking television