The Tudors

Though the fact that it airs on a pay-cable channel allows The Tudors to be extraordinarily sexy and violent, the approach to the plot feels like something we've seen before, perhaps on public television or a mainstream period film. Unlike Rome -- in whose footsteps The Tudors is clearly following -- the series looks at the politics of the day from the top down, which is a perspective many viewers are already familiar with. The handmaiden the king impregnates is silenced; the children hardly speak; and the folks who tend to drive the action are the king and his closest advisors. Altogether the series is good enough and may eventually develop into something more than the sum of its parts, but viewers might not feel as passionately about The Tudors as its characters do about sex, violence, and politics.

The cast is marvelously peppered with character actors -- like Sam Neill as Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and James Frain as Thomas Cromwell -- and, overall, the acting is good (if a bit exaggeratedly Shakespearian at times). That said, the problem with seeing so many familiar faces is that it can be distracting to recall where you've seen them before.