CORRUPT: “The Borgias” is about Pope Alexander VI’s (Jeremy Irons, center) family. (Mark Seliger/©Showtime)
If you can get past the many face of Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia/Pope Alexander VI, in Showtime’s lush and luscious historical series “The Borgias,” you’re in for a full-out good time.
And the series comes not a moment too soon.
After Showtime played as skillfully with historical facts in their wondrous “The Tudors” as Henry VIII did with church law, we were all ready, willing and salivating for more historical role playing.
Enter the Borgia family, a brilliantly amoral bunch who became not just the most powerful family during the Renaissance, a period of artistic and political brilliance, but also the most perverse, murderous and probably incestuous family — perhaps of all time.
“The Borgias” (the series) makes “The Tudors” look like a bunch of amateurs with bigger lips.
The series opens with Rodrigo Borgia (Irons) and the other cardinals at the deathbed of Pope Innocent VIII, who had, until then, held power over a morally decaying Rome.
The minute he dies, the cardinals go into full-speed greed, with Rodrigo bribing every cardinal he can and killing off anyone he can’t. That would include the successful murder of Cardinal Orsini (Derek Jacobi) and the not-successful garroting of archenemy Cardinal Della Rovere (Colm Feore). (Never leave an enemy alive and wounded!)
Meantime, the pope’s mistress, Vanozza (Joanne Whalley), and their four children (who were as public as any modern politician’s family), are lapping up the good life in his lush villa.
The minute Rodrigo becomes pope, however, he finds God — along with a newer, younger, more beautiful mistress, Giulia Farnese (Lotte Verbeek), whom he publicly displays.
Meantime, his oldest sons, Cesare (Francois Arnaud) and Juan (David Oakes), are recruited to work for Daddy Drearest. Cesare, who is in love with his 12-year-old sister, Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger), is made a cardinal (which he hates) and Juan is made head of the Papal armies (which he loves).
In short order, the still-innocent but about-to-be infamous Lucrezia, is married off to the violent, sullen, 40-something-year-old Giovanni Sforza (Ronan Vibert), who rapes her after ignoring her.
But the most perverse scene? When the exiled Della Rovere visits the French king, who has a life-size recreation of the Last Supper featuring the mummified corpses of his critics
Breasts, blood, battles and babes — that’s what I call the Renaissance.