Tudors Renewed for Season 4

[shipperx]

From EW.com:

'The Tudors': Showtime renews drama for a fourth season

Apr 13, 2009, 03:39 PM | by Jeremy Medina

Categories: Television

Fresh off of passing on a number of buzzworthy prospective pilots (including a spinoff of The L Word and a pilot written and directed by Tim Robbins), Showtime has announced it will renew historical drama series The Tudors for a fourth and final season, according to Variety. The 10-episode season will debut in the spring of 2010. Series creator and executive producer Michael Hirst will also be back to write each episode, which will conclude the saga of King Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and chronicle his final two marriages and subsequent mental instability. The Tudors is one of the network's top-rated series, with the third season's April 5 premiere netting a cumulative total of 1.3 million viewers.

Comments

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

I'm too cheap to get showtime, but I was thinking about renting The Tudors. I take it you'd recommend it?

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I wasn't particularly into it in the first part of the first season. (Its staging is highly anachronistic and that initially annoyed. It's got the usual modern American insistance that everyone shown be beautiful, well-washed, and wearing makeup. And, it has the Premium Cable tendency to see exactly how much nudity and sex they can get away with... which is a lot.) But, after a while, (I think) it found its footing and is actually an enjoyable rush through history. I've enjoyed Season 2 & (what's aired of) Season 3. Both more fun than Season 1.

It is telescoped history because Henry is still young and attractive when he should be well into middle age and fat by now, and they are apparently going all the way through his marriages to his death because they're up to wife #3, having having already cast #4 & #5 with the Season 4 bringing in wife #6.

I thought they were fair to Anne Boleyn (in season 2), casting her neither as wholly victim nor wholly villain (she isn't always nice, but she did love him and was innocent of the crimes she was convicted of. Sometimes you'd think "what a bitch" and other times you'd feel sorry for her). And they took liberties with her brother as I don't know that there is actual evidence that he was gay (In the series he is, as is the other guy executed for being Anne's 'lover' -- he was likable and damn pretty and I felt worse for what happened to him than either Anne or her brother). And, given the telescoping of history and Henry's tendency to accuse folks of treason, there's a pretty high cast turnover. At this point I think there are only two original cast members left -- Henry and (his best friend) Charles Brandon. Everyone else comes and goes either due to death or the focus of the season. (There are characters that didn't die in Season 2 that aren't back in Season 3. I suppose we're to think they were banished from court along with the remnants of the Boleyns).

I think that the process of watching Henry degenerate is more dramatically interesting than Season 1 golden-boy Henry. Since he started down the dark path to duplicity and tyranny, he's become increasingly interesting.

Short answer -- yeah, I rec it. But I warn that it takes a while to get into the rhythem of it and for the series to get itself right.