Left Flank

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.

Someone should tell Bill Maher that laughing is neither good comedic form, nor an intelligible argument. But, Richard Dawkins is more than funny, and intelligible, enough to compensate.

The older I get I just return to my undergrad days and what I too quickly heard and read then—including about discussing God.

If only for its visceral qualities—tar and feathering, inoculations, the truth beneath those wigs—HBO's John Adams is an unexpected television treasure. If only Benjamin Franklin had farted on film! How many times have I wanted some producer to dramatize this book or that! I never expected the next one to be David McCullough's John Adams.

I still don't admire John Adams as much as other figures of the age, such as John Marshall or James Madison.

An obvious reason is the question of dynasty. America is currently contemplating replacing one political dynasty, the Bushes, with another, the Clintons. This might seem odd for a country that was born in a revolt against hereditary privilege. But Adams's career suggests that it might not be so odd after all. Adams's eldest son, John Quincy, became America's sixth president despite losing the popular vote to a man from Tennessee. Fully 45% of the members of the first Congress in 1789 were related to each other. (Today 10% of members of Congress have relatives who also served in Congress.)

That none of the other early presidents produced a dynasty may owe more to accidents of biology—none of them produced a son—than to a deep-seated aversion to family privilege. Adams also has a quality that endears him to modern audiences: a cussed authenticity. Washington comes across as too good to be true. Jefferson owned 200 slaves at the time when he held «these truths to be self-evident».

Adams, the advocate of the hereditary principle, was the only one of the first three presidents to have pulled himself up by his bootstraps (his father was a farmer and a cobbler and his mother was probably illiterate) and the Adamses, father and son, were unique among the first dozen presidents in not owning slaves. He could also be irreverent about his fellow revolutionaries. He said that Washington's main qualification for leadership was that he was always the tallest man in the room, and he complained that Jefferson hogged all the glory for writing the Declaration of Independence.

Adams was also fortunate in his wife. Abigail was arguably America's most impressive first lady, a first-rate intellect who devoted her life to tending Adams's farm and raising a family of scholar-statesmen. Abigail was not the sort of woman to boast that she had solved this or that diplomatic problem because she had had a few people to tea. But she had strong views on racial and sexual equality, fulminating against «the sin of slavery» and advocating women's rights.

Adams's record may also strike a chord with a country that has grown weary of George Bush's mission to democratise the world. Adams believed that democracy needed to be restrained by checks and balances, by the good sense of the educated elite, and by the rule of law. (The HBO series rightly starts with an account of Adams's decision to brave the American mob and defend a group of British soldiers who were accused of massacring innocent Americans.) He also believed that a constitutional system could thrive only in the right soil. America is in the mood for Adams's dyspeptic common sense.

Let's not forget the Alien and Sedition Acts!

But, thanks to him, there's this generation's interpretation of the Founding experience, and one of the rare dramatizations of the 18th Century that doesn't just look silly or distant.