Saturday, November 10, 2007

I was watching THE TUDORS for a while. Nice performance by Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the sexy, passionate, willful King Henry VIII. Lovely costumes, of course.

But what a mess. The episodes are a hodgepodge of events, one following another with no story logic to speak of. Cardinal Wolsey advises King Henry to charge an upstart Duke with anything but treason, so he can be beheaded without offending his friends. Next thing you know, he's being executed for treason. Why? Whose idea was that? What went wrong?

And the editing makes no damn sense at all. For a while there I was convinced that what we're watching here in Canada must have been edited down from the original British version. The episodes go out on any old thing. But then, they're not telling stories, strictly speaking, and it's hard to go out on something satisfying when you haven't been building up to them.

The sex feels excessive and gratuitous. One character who's been barely more than window dressing gets a gay seduction scene, then goes back to window dressing.

Argh! I like period TV. I loved ROME. But you still have to tell a story.

Labels: watching tv

11:38 AM

3 Comments:

The fun of the show is that it's full of creepy foreboding. Since we already know what happens in the end, it's like watching movie characters decide whether to go into that haunted house.

By  Lisa Hunter, at 7:38 AM  

I've been watching The Tudors, too, and I agree, the storytelling/editing is a bit of a mess.

By  Kelly J. Crawford, at 1:25 PM  

I'm pretty sure they are edited down. Showtime runs them at an hour, no? And I believe the Beeb does, too, so that means CBC is likely chunking out 10 to 14 minutes an episode.

I concur with your observations and no where else has this been raised, so I'm blaming CBC.

I made a conscious decision to wait for the boxed set for this exact reason.

By  ME, at 3:46 PM  

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