Reviewer Skewer's Showtimes "The Borgias"

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
By Ingrid Rowland

TELEVISION - Caravaggio novels, as a knowledgeable friend has observed, are not only unrelentingly bad, but bad in the same way (this friend remains nameless in order to avoid the remonstrances of outraged Caravaggio novelists and Derek Jarman). A related case of badness afflicts The Borgias, the new Showtime TV series that bears the name of director Neil Jordan and improbably stars Jeremy Irons as the patriarch of the powerful fifteenth- and sixteenth-century clan. In forty-five-minute doses, The Borgias presents viewers with a veritable banquet of badnesses: the by-definition badness of bodice-ripping costume drama, the badness of the directorial ego-trip, the badness of Low Budget/High Pretensions, the badness of gratuitous violence, and that sovereign badness of not knowing where you want to go because you don’t know where you are in the first place. [link]