Just to disabuse readers about The Tudors, I included the bloopers reel. After months of hits for the last post on Showtime's newest costume drama, I couldn't resist biting the links that feed me. My heart is still somewhere in the late 19th Century Dakotas.Here's the story so far:

A year later, Queen Catherine was banished from court and her old rooms were given to Anne. With Wolsey gone, Anne now had considerable power over government appointments and political matters. When Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died, Anne had the Boleyn family's chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, appointed to the vacant position. Through the intervention of the King of France, this was conceded by Rome, the pallium being granted to him by Clement. The breaking of the power of Rome in England proceeded little by little. In 1532, a lawyer who was a supporter of Anne, Thomas Cromwell, brought before Parliament a number of acts including the Supplication against the Ordinaries and the Submission of the Clergy, which recognised Royal Supremacy over the church. Following these acts, Thomas More resigned as Chancellor, leaving Cromwell as Henry's chief minister. Henry attended a meeting with the French king at Calais in the winter of 1532, in which he hoped he could enlist the support of Francis I of France for his new marriage. The conference at Calais was a political triumph, since the French government gave its support for Henry's re-marriage. Immediately upon returning to Dover in England, Henry and Anne went through a secret wedding service. She soon became pregnant and, as was the custom with royalty, there was a second wedding service, which took place in London on 25 January 1533. Events now began to move at a quick pace. On 23 May 1533, Cranmer, sitting in judgment at a special court convened at Dunstable Priory to rule on the validity of the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, declared the marriage of Henry and Catherine null and void. Five days later, on 28 May 1533, Cranmer declared the marriage of Henry and Anne to be good and valid. Catherine was formally stripped of her title as queen and Anne was consequently crowned queen consort on 1 June 1533. The queen gave birth slightly prematurely on 7 September 1533. Anne had given birth to a girl...

Fans have noticed a few inaccuracies. The Gray Lady wants to ruin the entire visual, and olfactory, experience for all of us.

If “The Tudors” fails to live up to the great long-form dramas cable television has produced, it is not simply because it refuses the visceral messiness of a “Rome” or a “Deadwood” (the corpse-eating pigs!) but more significantly because it radically reduces it’s the era’s thematic conflicts to simplistic struggles over personal and erotic power. “The Tudors” makes it seem as if the entire creation of the Anglican Church boiled down to Henry’s wish to remarry and sire a male heir. (When Anne gives birth to a daughter this season, the future Elizabeth I, Henry looks as if he were a little boy who got the wrong kind of tricycle at Christmas.) “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Big Love” all have derived their potency from dramatizing the preservation of failing institutions. The paradox of “The Tudors” is that it takes on one of the most powerful and protested institutions in human history — the Catholic Church during the Renaissance — and provides little sense of what the English people have to gain or lose by breaking with it. Peter O’Toole arrives this season as Pope Paul III, playing him as a drawing-room wit, a delicious performance that only serves to mitigate further any sense of the papacy’s hegemony. Henry VIII was a man of extreme faith who attended Mass five times a day. Watching “The Tudors” you’d think he spent most of that time shaving.

That's a little tough. I've liked the portrayal of Sir Thomas More, which has been much more nuanced than the standard Hollywood performance in A Man for All Seasons. Finally, though, Curzon has wondered about the disappearance of the 3rd Duke of Norfolk in the second season (of which I've only seen four episodes until now). Considering how Rome ended on a fairy tale despite its grittiness, that one development makes me nervous. After Deadwood folded, my patience might not outlast the second season. The Tudors are somewhere between Rome and Deadwood, but I doubt either Showtime or HBO can match corpse-munching pigs and Wild Bill Hickok.