Good and bad.
I just watched this first season on Netflix, and I do believe that it is at least equal to the Showtime production in most ways, with a few very notable exceptions.Mind you, it's not a carbon copy; the story lines follow the same basic historical themes, but the two shows choose somewhat different avenues to explore, which is interesting. This show does seem to hew closer to historical truth (although at times it's more simplistic), but also falls short in a few places.
First off, the choice of John Doman as Rodrigo Borgia was a bad one. He's not a bad actor, but the part was clearly not written for him. When you have an entire cast that share appropriate period/regional accents, it becomes jarring and downright bizarre to hear the lead character speak in unvarnished American tones.
Further, the writing does nothing to accommodate for this. See, most Americans can't pull off long lines of casual conversational dialog that include full proper English like 'will not' or 'does not', as the British can. Instead we rely on contractions like 'won't' or 'doesn't' unless we're giving particular emphasis to the subject (or giving a speech). Its an adaptive peculiarity to be sure, but one which we employ for good reason; it just sounds odd otherwise.
The writers completely failed to account for this reality, and instead wrote Doman's lines as though they were to be read by a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The result is dialog which comes out unbelievably clunky and difficult to listen to. Every time Doman opened his mouth, it pulled me right out of the show. It was clear that he just didn't know how to deliver these lines. Bad bad bad, and in a show with such high overall production values, it should never have been allowed to remain so.
The other issue is that this show clearly didn't have to same budget as its Showtime counterpart, and that comes through in the quality of some of the CGI as well as the smallness of some of the sets. It just doesn't feel as grand.
It's worth watching to be sure, but it could have been much better with a few very minor changes.
score 6/10
tpaladino 14 October 2011
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2504186/14578
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