The Young Pope: Will Jude Law's 'sexy pontiff' cause offence?

The Young Pope, a new television drama starring Jude Law as a fictional American pontiff, has been causing a buzz – but will this mischievous take on a taboo subject cause outrage?

The series from Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty, Il Divo, Youth) caught the attention of critics at the Venice International Film Festival in September.

Law plays Lenny Belardo, a contradictory, conservative and chain-smoking man who becomes the youngest pope ever at the age of 47 and the first American to be appointed to the role. As the newly titled Pius XIII, he discovers that the powerful cardinals plan to run things for him behind the scenes and calls in Sister Mary (Diane Keaton), a nun who ran the orphanage where he grew up, as his adviser.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Daily Mail asks if The Young Pope is "the most sacrilegious depiction of the Pope ever" and predicts that Law is "set to cause controversy as the chain-smoking, megalomaniac pontiff". Despite the great critical response, "Catholics around the world may not appreciate the unusual take on the leader of the church", says the newspaper.

Nevertheless, the ten-episode series has just debuted to "stellar ratings" on Sky in Italy, reports Variety. The first two episodes drew an average 953,000 viewers there, making it the best debut audience ever in Italy for a Sky-produced show, beating the previous record set for its mob drama Gomorrah.

Law shines in the debut, which boasts "extraordinary visuals, fascinating Vatican machinations and Diane Keaton in a wimple", says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

The critic says that, like Don Draper or Tony Soprano, Law's character is a man "beset by personal doubts and distracted and seduced by vulgar office politics". Bradshaw describes the series as "very strange, anxious, whimsical and surreal", with Law "on top form as the cunning, troubled young Pontiff". He adds that this might "turn out to be Sorrentino's Twin Peaks".

Indeed, who knows where Sorrentino's "amusing, unpredictable and irreverent Vatican fantasy" will lead, says Deborah Young at Hollywood Reporter. From the look of the first two hours, this is a potential hit combining the Italian director's "sardonic, Fellini-inspired gift for the bizarre with the world's ever-growing hunger to peep behind the screens at St Peter's".

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"content_original","fid":"102509","attributes":{"class":"media-image"}}]]

Sometimes Sorrentino's taste for the grotesque gets out of hand, admits the critic, but his "acid spirit" and comic approach to the hidebound traditions of the Papal state, along with a "commandingly arch Jude Law" serve the show well.

The Wrap's Alonso Duralde argues that the show about a "sexy young pontiff" sometimes seems to be searching for a tone.

The critic says the series often seems "uncomfortably perched between satire and nighttime soap". But for all its narrative vacillations, Duralde admits, the cliffhanger ending of the opener "has me planning to tune in to find out what happens next".

The Young Pope debuts on Sky Atlantic on Thursday 27 October at 9pm.