The Young Pope

The Young Pope is wickedly funny and deeply insightful.

Despite the pace, the show is a chilling, challenging and visually stunning piece of work.

The Young Pope is as compellingly watchable as anything else you’ll find on TV. Sorrentino intuitively understands that which makes Catholicism--with its crosscurrents of guilt and exuberant hope as well as the opulent pageantry of the Vatican--fascinating grist for storytelling. And he’s unafraid to go what seems at first too far in service of a story that finds the universal in one warped leader’s specificities.

In the end, it's Law's incredible performance--certainly one of his best--that makes Lenny compelling, mysterious, and complex. We can't help but fall under his charismatic spell and stick with him through trying moments.

The spontaneity rumbling through The Young Pope illuminates the unruly possibilities of human and spiritual connection, and its sly, deadpan wit is often a delight.

The Young Pope is a fascinating mess with a puckish sense of humor and an outsized goal--to know the mind of God.

Intellectually challenging while arguably also going off the rails more than a few times, The Young Pope has its work cut out in luring a sizable audience.

At all times, The Young Pope is a meticulously filmed series featuring a fantastic central performance--plus a bonus Diane Keaton as the Young Pope’s nun mentor!--that knows better than to take itself completely seriously.

The series' strength is that it is difficult to pin down; it zigs when you expect it to zag.

It’s the kind of blank canvas needed to host Sorrentino’s compelling strangeness, making The Young Pope alternatingly addicting and infuriating, like the most interesting ambitious dramas competing to make noise in the age of #PeakTV.

The show is too smart to be so easily dismissed, but whether its depiction of Vatican politics--and especially its title character’s abrasive personality--warrant devotion will be in the eye of the beholder. Lenny’s not a likable character, but The Young Pope offers addictive stories of unpredictable political maneuvering.

Thanks to Law's bravura performance, bristling with cagey charisma and cruelty playful and arrogant inscrutability, this young pope has a way of keeping everyone off guard. [16-29 Jan 2017, p.16]

The Young Pope is frequently tedious in a very dazzling way. But it’s also an extraordinary portrait of the kind of loneliness and neediness that sparks in some men an almost psychopathic quest to dominate others, and of the myopic enablers who convince themselves that their work is God’s plan.

[Paulo Sorrentino] invents a coolly seductive physical world to match the oddness of his story. Even as The Young Pope slowly moves among its different tones--serious religious drama, soap opera, satire, dystopian nightmare--it remains consistent in one important quality: stark originality.

The Young Pope keeps its audience at a distance, but it also keeps that audience guessing. And not just about the next curveball it’s going to throw or abrupt left turn Lenny’s going to take, but about the fundamental mysteries of faith.

The show is best when Sorrentino and Law produce arresting moments that play like ironic religious art. [13 Jan 2017, p.52]

This is, in many ways, one of the weirdest, most counterintuitive programs ever to get a green light from HBO, and that alone merits the benefit of the doubt for now.

The Young Pope is risky, reckless, flawed and fierce.

Sorrentino's taste for the grotesque at times gets out of hand, but generally serves him well in this comic approach to the hidebound traditions of the miniscule Papal state.