The Young Pope

Yes, it's all decidedly odd.

It really depends on how drawn in you are by the Vatican intrigue crafted by show creator Paolo Sorrentino, and how beguiled you are by Jude Law’s performance.

All The Young Pope proves is that absolute power is absolutely boring.

The Young Pope feels more like an eccentric foreign film than a TV series. Except it is a TV series--and little quirks that might seem charming in a 90-minute movie can begin to grate across several episodes.

The humorless Young Pope doesn’t exactly crackle as a backstage political drama. Many of the scenes seem stagey, with actors gliding in and out of large rooms to be received at a wooden desk.

With its over-the-top plot and rococo themes, it just comes across as Eurotrash--intellectually pretentious, but it sure is pretty to look at it.

The specificity with which he [Paolo Sorrentino] executes The Young Pope speaks to a brand of vision whose interest is the art as opposed to the venue in which it is presented. Consequently, it’s possible to appreciate the magnitude and originality of his extraordinary approach while admitting that it doesn’t effectively tell us the whole story, or the best one.

HBO made five of the series’ 10 episodes available to critics, and perhaps The Young Pope makes sense as a whole. Half the loaf, however, is half-baked. In spite of that, and because of wonderful performances by James Cromwell, as an older cardinal who was Belardo’s mentor and resents that he wasn’t chosen pope himself, Cécile de France as the Vatican’s marketing director, and Orlando, The Young Pope has something that makes you keep with it.

The problem with The Young Pope is that it never artfully draws you in deep enough to care. Created and directed by Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino ("The Great Beauty"), it is drearily paced, choppy and often self-consciously bizarre. It's beautiful to gaze upon, filled with sumptuous shots that look like majestic oil paintings. And the supporting cast is impressive.

At times, Sorrentino's approach is bracingly different. But many, many more times, The Young Pope leaves us alternating between admiring Sorrentino's craft and wondering why this is so lugubriously paced and cryptically written.

When it’s good--well, it’s still often pretty bad, but it’s also gorgeous and appealingly weird.

It’s often too straight-faced to be satirical, and the hodge-podge of accents sometimes undercuts the dramatic intensity.

It has languid pacing and an earnest streak about religious devotion. This streak, with its provocative but often specious and unchallenged ideas about celebrity and religiosity, fame and faith, are the only unintentionally risible aspects of the series.

Like the Vatican itself, Pope is beautiful, lush and carefully, formally composed. It’s also oddly airless and cold, more a series of striking pictures than a living and breathing slice of life, one that leaves you with no way in and little reason to care. Style doesn't just trump substance here; it's the only substance The Young Pope has. And that seems wrong.

The Young Pope is new, but hardly improved. And to use a very American expression, the series too often feels as if it's all hat, and no cattle.