‘The Young Pope’: What Exactly Do Film Auteurs Bring To TV?

When The Young Pope premieres on HBO this weekend, it’s poised to shock viewers with its powerful visuals (Hello, Jude Law crawling out of a mountain of inert babies!) and irreverent tone. The lush series is Italian film auteur Paolo Sorrentino‘s latest opus and it carries with it all of the hallmarks of his best work: fashion, beauty, irony, excess, and meditative moments on what it means to age. The Young Pope, therefore, feels like something “other” than normal television. It’s an ambitious art film stretched into a 10-episode television season.
And yet, as I watched the first episode, I kept asking myself, “Do great film auteurs belong in television?”
Sorrentino’s direction style elevates The Young Pope into a new artistic stratosphere. There are scenes, nay, entire sequences, that feel as though they are skipping into a new narrative frontier. He meshes the old with the new, the beautiful with the hideous, and employs all sorts of seductive camera tricks and shocking narrative tricks to hook the viewer. And yet, I have a small quibble with the show. In between these incredible punches of artistic power, I found myself… bored.

I know! I know! How can a sexy young pope who smokes and wears hats and drinks Cherry Coke Zero be boring? Well, for me, it felt sometimes like Sorrentino was trying to fill the space between these jaw-dropping scenes with filler. You know, like he was a film director vamping for time to fill 10 hours of story instead of a mere two or three. And that’s not great! As superficial of a flaw as it is, it speaks to the big issue that a lot of great film directors are having as they wade into the waters of Peak TV: the discovery that a television show isn’t just a long-ass movie.

Last year, both Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen attempted television and face-planted big time. Scorsese tried to recreate the cocaine-fueled golden days of ’70s rock in Vinyl. The show looked like it would be a slam dunk — Scorsese does TV! What a slam dunk! — but it wound up being a dud because it was so utterly Scorsese. As Scott Porch wrote in his piece on Vinyl‘s cancelation:

But there was nothing new about Vinyl; to state it less charitably, everything was old about Vinyl. The pilot plays like a serviceable, well-executed film that Martin Scorsese made 15 years ago and put in a time capsule marked: “Do not open until 2016.” The look, the themes, the voiceovers, the whole “let’s show people how rock-and-roll’s supposed to make you feel!” vibe — it’s all been done.

Woody Allen’s Crisis in Six Scenes suffered from similar problems. The expectations for the auteur’s first series were as high as the stratosphere and the results were as poor as could be expected. It wasn’t just that Woody Allen was just regurgitating Woody Allen for the small screen; he was pushing bad Woody Allen for the small screen. Allen himself recognized that it was a disaster. He told The Hollywood Reporter:

“It’s much harder than I thought. I thought, ‘Oh, I do a movie all the time, and I’ve gotten so that I can do them,’ and I thought ‘Television, just six half hours, I can knock that off as if it’s nothing.’ But it wasn’t nothing. It was very hard work and I struggled and worked hard and it was much harder work than a movie and even more because you have to begin and end all of the time. It was a big nuisance. I mean, I couldn’t just phone it in, to say the least.”

Television and film are both difficult mediums to nail, but they are inherently different. That’s the challenge for great film auteurs. The skills required to pull off a successful two-hour film aren’t going to help you when you have to build a coherent season of television. You’re talking about a slim three-act story versus a potentially never-ending serial. Television is also art made by committee. Even the greatest of “auteur” showrunners rely upon producers, directors, casting directors, and a writing staff to help realize their vision. And because of the nature of television, the auteurs that emerge tend to be focused and prolific writers and not visionary directors. In the past, the film side of Hollywood sneered at television. It was cheaper, tawdrier, and less artistic. But today television is an artistic playground for writers. Television is where Hollywood’s best and brightest go to spread their wings and experiment — and viewers have come to expect spectacle from the small screen. So, as the old guard of directors begins to play with TV, they’re sadly learning that leaning on old tropes is not going to hack it, phoning it in won’t work, and, yes, television is very different from film.

Which brings us back to The Young Pope. Sorrentino’s series is not an unmitigated disaster — not in the slightest! It’s an exciting, outlandish, and luminous spectacle that challenges our understanding of religion, faith, and storytelling. It’s a welcome addition to the canon of Peak TV not only for its strengths, but for its spare weaknesses. Those quiet “boring” scenes that build from one scene to another are revelatory in their own way. You can almost feel Sorrentino’s own frustration in them. He, too, seems to want to use every second to fill the screen with irreverence and wonder. Even though these quiet scenes are made to fill in the foundation of the story, they are also laden with small asides that wink to Sorrentino’s penchant for weirdness. A routine confessional can explain a character’s political place in the Vatican and introduce his perverse attraction to an antique fertility statue. It’s easy to forgive these staid scenes for the ambition of the piece as a whole.
So to answer my question: Auteurs are more than welcome to jump into television if ambitious television is what they want to do. What Sorrentino is doing right with The Young Pope is that he is doing something new. If film auteurs want to cut it in the crowded landscape of television, they need to be as pioneering as their new rivals. Television is no longer film, but cheaper and smaller; Television is an expansive frontier where anything goes — but the same old.
The Young Pope premieres on HBO this Sunday, January 15. Episode Two premieres the next evening. 

Where to Stream 'The Young Pope'