A little more than halfway through its first season, it’s clear HBO’s “The Young Pope” is a striking visual masterpiece. It’s also a terrible television show.
Each episode of director Paolo Sorrentino’s project has two or three shots artful enough to be frozen and put in a museum, whether it be Young Pope Lenny Belardo (Jude Law) strolling through the gardens in the dark or Young Pope Lenny Belardo shrouded in shadow as he makes his first papal address. The concept of Young Pope Lenny Belardo dressing himself while “Sexy and I Know It” plays in the background is brilliant, and the execution of the scene is equally virtuosic.
All of this, however, goes to waste. Young Pope Lenny Belardo, on whom “The Young Pope” hinges, is a non-entity of a character. His goals are unclear and his demeanor is inconsistent. He is not scintillatingly unpredictable but rather frustratingly and stupidly so. Lenny smokes cigarettes, loves Cherry Coke Zero and hates gay people. Lenny flirts with the Prime Minister of Greenland, an inexplicably glamorous woman who appears for exactly one episode before vanishing. Lenny has abandonment issues, he juggles oranges, he prays so hard that he nearly orgasms, he accidentally drops a baby on its head. He is cruel and steely yet incompetent, thirsty for power yet indifferent to public opinion. Lenny is also very, very handsome. In a television landscape where middle-aged white male anti-heroes are a dime a dozen, it takes more than just a flowing robe to stand out. Lenny is Frank Underwood without the cunning, Don Draper without the charisma, Walter White without the clarity of purpose.
Like Lenny himself, “The Young Pope” lacks drive and cohesion, reveling in its crafty flourishes instead of building a narrative. It is hour upon hour of imagery in service of nothing, and can be laughably, flamboyantly terrible. The show is so concerned with creating a memorable shot that it sacrifices narrative, unity and dialogue. Why is a septuagenarian nun playing basketball in her habit? Why is a kangaroo roaming the gardens of the Vatican? Perhaps most pressingly, why does Silvio Orlando’s depiction of the scheming Cardinal Voiello entail wearing a gigantic prosthetic mole on his cheek?
These questions have no answers because “The Young Pope” has no plot. Lenny lacks direction and so do his adversaries. Through the first half of the season, Cardinal Voiello is Lenny’s central and only antagonist, and even Voiello can’t seem to decide whether or not he likes the Young Pope — he gathers the evidence required to create a scandal only then to quickly dispose of said evidence.
Nor does Lenny seem particularly at odds with the institution he represents. He may be young, but his doctrine is conservative and regressive. Lenny crusades to remove homosexuals from the church and thunders to the cardinals about how tolerance is overrated. The question of modern youth versus the established ritual of the Catholic Church is an interesting one — yet one which “The Young Pope” chooses to entirely ignore.
In the sixth episode, Lenny finds a potentially worthy adversary after meeting with the smirking and confident Italian Prime Minister. Their meeting is one of the more intriguing scenes thus far, and should have taken place around the second episode. The show cries out for a legitimate source of conflict, which hopefully the second half of the season will provide.
Even a newly introduced, well-crafted plot line — which, by the way, “The Young Pope” has shown a complete lack of — may not be enough to salvage the show. “House of Cards” has made Kevin Spacey say some painfully hokey things, but none were as bad as when Jude Law peers down his nose at Voiello and says — in case it wasn’t clear — “I am the young Pope.”
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