Showtime’s “The Tudors” Challenges HBO’s “The Sopranos”

On Sunday, April 8, the final episodes of “The Sopranos” will start airing on HBO. Rival pay-TV network Showtime has made an interesting programming move in starting its series about Henry VIII, “The Tudors,” the Sunday before. While Henry and his family will be on an hour after Tony and his crew, the challenge for Sunday night grown-up drama is there for all to see. For once, the winners will be the viewers.

Showtime has 13 million subscribers compared to around 28 million for HBO. The overlap, those who subscribe to both, is a hard number to derive. This makes it difficult to do the kind of programming that ABC, NBC and CBS have traditionally done – putting good shows up against weak competition, because anyone with a TV got those networks.

That said, HBO’s success with “The Sopranos” was such that viewers were prepared to try other dramas from the network, “Six Feet Under” and “Deadwood” for example. Showtime has had only one real success in this market, the recently shown “Dexter.” Interestingly, the network chose to air episode 1 of that series as a lead-in to “The Tudors.” This may be the beginning of a successful branding effort for Showtime dramas.

“The Tudors” has everything Tony and his families (biological and otherwise) have: violence, sex, really nice clothes. Indeed, in the first episode of “The Tudors” there was an assassination and an adulterous copulation within three minutes of the opening shot. Of course, those familiar with the history of the era know what will happen to Henry, Catherine, Anne, the Cardinal and so on. Nonetheless, the first hour proved vibrant and viewable.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry himself knows how to play the part, “I want people to love to hate him. He’s a bastard, but he’s an interesting bastard. And the way they lit and photographed him, he’s an attractive bastard. They’ll like him against [their] better judgment.” James Gandolfini may have said much the same about Tony Soprano, save the attractiveness. Also, Sam Neill as Cardinal Wolsey shines and has a similar take on the series, “There’s hardly anyone in the story with clean hands, and hardly anyone who’s not affected kind of tragically. At the same time, these people were larger than life. They bestrode history. They were extraordinary figures in an extraordinary time.” And if Showtime can’t make a decent series out of that, it should fold up its tent.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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