The Borgias ran for three seasons on Showtime, from April 3, 2011 to June 16, 2013, and got 29 episodes out of a story Neil Jordan had planned to tell in four. That gap is the whole review in miniature. What aired is one of the most beautifully mounted dramas of its era, and it was killed by the thing it was about: money, and the cost of holding on to power.
Trailer, via SHOWTIME.
A Pope Bought With Bribes
The Borgias opens in Renaissance Italy with the election of Rodrigo Borgia to the papacy, won through simony and bribery. Jeremy Irons plays him, and the casting is the show’s foundation. Rodrigo becomes Pope Alexander VI, and the series tracks what he does with the office once he has it.
The synopsis is blunt about the project: Rodrigo commits every sin in the book to amass and retain power, influence and enormous wealth for himself and his family. The Borgias does not flinch from that. It also does not pretend the sin is the point. The sin is the method.
What makes the first season work is the machinery around the man. Rodrigo’s sons, Cesare and Juan, help him buy the election. Once he has won, the family is pushed into fifteenth-century European politics — shifting loyalties inside the College of Cardinals, the ambitions of the kings of Europe, the venomous rivalries between Italy’s noble families.
Della Rovere’s Long Grudge
The show’s best engine is the man who lost. Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, played by Colm Feore, is enraged by his defeat and travels across Italy and France looking for allies to depose or kill Alexander. His goal is specific: force another papal conclave, and win it without Borgia in the way.
That is a clean, durable spine for a series, and The Borgias uses it well. Della Rovere is not a villain in the ordinary sense. He is a man running a campaign against a pope who bought his job, and the show lets him be right about the facts while being no cleaner about the methods.
It is the rare prestige drama where the antagonist’s argument holds up.
Cesare, Juan, and the Sibling War
The family story is where the series takes its real risks. The Borgias follows the complicated relationships among Cesare, Juan and Lucrezia. Between Cesare and Juan there is deep rivalry — jealousy and resentment on Cesare’s side, inferiority and aggression on Juan’s.
François Arnaud plays Cesare. David Oakes plays Juan. Holliday Grainger plays Lucrezia. The three of them carry the show’s second season, which spends its time on Juan’s descent into addiction, illness, malice and madness. That descent ends in a confrontation between Juan and Cesare that forever changes the family.
The show does not treat that as a twist. It treats it as an inevitability the audience has been watching build since the first episode. The second season is the strongest of the three because of it.
The Incest Storyline
Then there is Cesare and Lucrezia. The series gives them an abiding intimacy and closeness that devolves into incest in Season 3. The Borgias frames this explicitly as its take on the persistent rumors about the historical siblings.
This is the most contested choice the show makes, and it is worth being precise about why. The historical record on the Borgia siblings is rumor and slander as much as anything else. The series does not adjudicate. It dramatizes the rumor and asks you to watch what it does to the family.
It is a gamble that mostly pays off, because the show has spent two seasons earning the closeness before it goes there.
What Showtime Canceled
The third season aired from April 14, 2013. In June 2013, Showtime canceled the series — one season short of Jordan’s planned four-season arc. The cancellation was implied to be due to the expense of production. Plans for a two-hour wrap-up finale were also scrapped.
A fan campaign tried to convince Showtime to revive the series. In August, it was announced that the series finale script would be released as an ebook, because a movie would be too expensive to produce.
That is the ending. Not a finale, a script. The Borgias is a show about the cost of ambition that was itself too expensive to finish, and the irony is not subtle.
The Cast Around Irons
Irons is the reason the show works at all. Rodrigo is a man who has already decided what he is willing to do, and Irons plays him without apology, which is the correct choice. A winking Borgia would have sunk this.
Around him, the supporting cast is doing specific work. Sean Harris plays Micheletto, Thure Lindhardt plays Rufio, Sebastian de Souza plays Alfonso of Aragon. Grainger’s Lucrezia grows across the three seasons from a bargaining chip in her family’s marriages into a participant in its politics.
The show also covers Lucrezia’s first and second marriage, her illegitimate child, and the affairs that surround them. Gioffre, the youngest sibling, is a minor player in the first season, absent entirely from the second, and only becomes a major plot point in the third.
The Verdict: 8.1 of 10
The Borgias earns its 8.1. Metacritic has it at 81 out of 100, and that is about right for a series that was consistently better than its reputation and never quite finished.
The case against it is real. Three seasons is not four. The third season is carrying story that needed more room, and the knowledge that the finale script shipped as an ebook rather than as television hangs over every late episode. A viewer starting The Borgias now should know going in that it stops rather than ends.
The case for it is stronger. Irons gives the show a center of gravity that holds even when the plotting sprawls. The della Rovere campaign gives it a spine. The Cesare and Juan rivalry gives it a pulse, and the second season’s payoff is the best thing the series does. The incest storyline is the show taking the rumors seriously as drama rather than as scandal, and it is more thoughtful about that than most prestige television would be.
What matters most, though, is the production. This is a Renaissance Italy built at real expense, and the expense is the reason it died. Showtime canceled it because it cost too much to make, then decided a two-hour finale cost too much to make either. The Borgias is a series about a family that buys power and cannot afford to keep it. It went out the same way.
Worth watching. Worth knowing how it ends — or does not.
The Numbers
- Score: 8.1/10
- Metacritic: 81/100
- Network: Showtime (US), Bravo! (Canada)
- Created by: Neil Jordan
- Seasons: 3
- Episodes: 29
- First aired: April 3, 2011
- Last aired: June 16, 2013
- Canceled: June 2013, one season short of a planned four-season arc
- Season 2 premiere: April 8, 2012
- Season 3 premiere: April 14, 2013
- Genres: Drama, Crime
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