The New Pope

Even when “The New Pope” stumbles, it’s hard to do anything but gape and marvel in the best way possible. The performances remain excellent. ... “The New Pope” itself has no interest in compromise, and for that, if you’ll pardon the expression, god be praised.

Outrageous, audacious, seductive, sexy and byzantine, to say nothing of visually voluptuous. ... “The New Pope,” which opens with Lenny Belardo, aka Pius XIII, still on life support, is about the writing—writing that, for most of the series’ nine episodes, is pure mischief.

Despite the sordid, festering material that the series explores, what ultimately emerges from The New Pope is sheer beauty. It’s an understated grace, one that director Paolo Sorrentino and cinematographer Luca Bigazzi effect with an eye to intimacy.

The payoffs of “The New Pope,” whether you enjoy them or not, are mostly in the visual flourishes and conceits, often set to pointedly secular pop songs. ... It has strong elements of workplace sitcom, but it even more closely resembles another venerable genre: the Mafia movie. Voiello and his ecclesiastical associates, bickering and maneuvering, are like the members of a crime family, making offers that maybe, with eternity in mind, you shouldn’t refuse.

It is all deeply weird. But maybe life inside the Vatican is just that?

Despite the three-and-a-half-year gap between The Young Pope and The New Pope, the nine-part sequel series feels remarkably contiguous with its predecessor. ... Occasionally, The New Pope flirts with transcendence.

As fun as it is to watch Malkovich inhabit him, he’s not as compelling as Pius, whose presence hovers over the season despite his being unconscious for a lot of it. ... The New Pope would be much more enjoyable if it were streamlined into the five or six episodes necessary to effectively tell the story that needs to be told. Instead, we get nine, at least three of which just tread water.

Malkovich carries the bulk of the show’s episodes and absolutely devours the role. ... But The New Pope often meanders in its excess too long without staying put. It’s less a story than a sermon with too many subjects, taking on greed, and sex, and faith, and corruption but only in general, arms-length terms.

The New Pope retains the formalist beauty and sumptuousness of its predecessor while failing to measure up storytelling-wise.

Malkovich’s John Brannox, later Pope John Paul III, is harder to read; his politics are less about power and dominance than a silkier sort of finesse. A viewer’s tolerance will vary, but it is striking to have a show that seems almost to demand a massive central performance suddenly defined by understatement, by refusal. What’s more, the statement the show makes about the Vatican seems more muddled than ever.