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What more could you want out of an historic drama than death, money, power, and Robb Stark (aka Richard Madden)? How about some Dustin Hoffman? Netflix’s newest original series, Medici: Masters of Florence offers us a fresh new look at one of history’s most important families.
The Medicis were a Florentine family of bankers who helped shape modern culture. Their ambition led them to develop the first sophisticated series of banks throughout Italy, creating a web of commerce that would fund nations and support the Renaissance. Seriously. Their financial contributions to the arts and literature helped spur our modern understanding of ourselves.
Medici: Masters of Florence plays with that family’s history. The series opens with patriarch Giovanni’s — played by Hoffman – death and funeral. History says he just died. Medici: Masters of Florence claims he was murdered by poison grapes. With his death, the eldest son Cosimo (Madden) ascends to the head of the family. He must juggle the family’s rising international power while fending off threats from all sides. While this happens, we continually flashback to a time twenty years in the past. We watch as Giovanni schemes his way into power and as he pushes his two sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo, to take up the family business. Young Cosimo has different dreams: He wants to be an artist. The show starts to pick up steam as soon as we get entrenched in the family’s past schemes to install a pope loyal to the Medici cause — just as Cosimo falls for a peasant girl he meets in Donatello’s Roman studio.
Head’s up: The Lorenzo de’ Medici in the series is *not* the Lorenzo de’ Medici you learned the name of in high school World History. That guy, while famous, is not in this show. Richard Madden’s Cosimo de’ Medici is that Lorenzo’s grandfather. The Lorenzo on the show is just another Lorenzo de’ Medici (aka Lorenzo the Elder). Season Two – which has already been commissioned — will follow the younger, more famous Lorenzo. No word yet on who will play him.
The series doesn’t offer anything spectacularly new to the historic drama (save for Dustin Hoffman’s odd attempt at an accept — it sounds more like he’s wheezing than anything else), but will likely interest hard core devotees of the genre. The one bright spot? Honestly, Richard Madden. The former Game of Thrones actor makes for a sympathetic and seductive Renaissance man.
