‘The Young Pope’ Was The Most Lynchian Show Of 2017 (Yes, Including ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’)

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that I’m a fan of The Young Pope. I reviewed every episode of the show, wrote several essays about it, interviewed creator Paolo Sorrentino about the show’s music choices—especially the instant-classic montage of Jude Law’s Pope Pius XIII (also known as Lenny Belardo) getting dressed for a ceremonial occasion set to LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It”—and co-hosted 11 hours of a podcast about the show. By now, it’s basically a compliment when acquaintances assume my love of The Young Pope is some kind of long-running joke, based on the impression that the show was mostly fodder for meme. I’m flattered that anyone thinks I’m capable of Nathan Fielder-esque levels of committing to the bit.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This is a show that many (most?) people encountered as a punchline; summarized an image of Don Draper holding a crudely drawn sign reading “the pope but he’s young.” Some of the details of the show don’t do much clear up that impression. This is a pope who has a pet kangaroo, kills a woman by praying at her, and literally drops a baby in a hospital room. And it definitely didn’t help that many (but not all) critics misunderstood the show, decrying it as abrasive or stupid. Isn’t The Young Pope basically a parody of prestige drama? Sort of! Wasn’t it just a ton of insane stuff happening while Jude Law sneered in a robe? Also yes! Isn’t it, like, about Trump if he was the pope? Not quite. But also, unfortunately, kind of.

Like the mysterious wholeness of the three-in-one God, everything about The Young Pope is somehow simultaneously the best thing about The Young Pope, but one of those best things is that it is both inflexibly singular and unabashedly omnivorous as a work of art. It’s difficult to imagine another television show or film effortlessly incorporating EDM into a story that features extensive discussion about liturgy, or that could put Diane Keaton playing a nun in a T-shirt reading “I’m a virgin but this is an old shirt” and expect her to be the spiritual mother of the messiah. That’s because even as The Young Pope veered between tones, uproarious and belittling in one moment and deadly serious, even rapturous the next, it never lost the plot—or at least, its own idea of what that meant.

In a year where it often felt like every piece of halfway decent art was compelled to announce itself as necessary, the unyielding rudeness of Lenny Belardo, directed at everyone from aging nuns to heads of state to God Himself, took the piss out of any attempt to conflate self-imposed gravity with genuine quality. In the same year we got a new season of Twin Peaks, when every other drama felt compelled to be “weird” or vaguely spiritual, The Young Pope more than earned the descriptor “Lynchian,” and often outdid the master himself in its commitment to following its dreamlike logical threads, setting Lenny adrift in a sea of portent as he worked through his abandonment issues without ever giving him and the audience a safe harbor. And when the now-ridiculously, overtly high stakes of modern politics threatened to artificially compress art into simple depictions of the forces of good and evil, The Young Pope refused to flinch at complexity. Sorrentino asks us to consider a world where Pius XIII is undoubtedly holy, marked by God to perform miracles—as well being an enormous, undeniable asshole.

For most of the first few weeks of 2017, I was wholly (holy?) intoxicated by The Young Pope, compelled to shout its greatness from the rooftops to the point where I was essentially incapable of talking about anything else. It’s an experience I’ve only ever had at the precipice of falling in love. This was also at the beginning of 2017’s bizarre, relentless assault upon my (and, I suspect, many others’) perception of time. The year has been largely characterized by confusion and a lack of control, as the days, weeks, and months have blurred together into a nightmare Doppler effect and personal, professional, and political losses have floated in and out of my field of view. This might be a partial explanation for why I responded so strongly to The Young Pope, but it’s not a reason to dismiss that response.

Whether he intended to or not, Sorrentino has captured something profound about what art is capable of in 2017. The contradictions woven into the heart of The Young Pope aren’t just its thematic obsessions with the trappings of authority, the power of prayer, and the obligations of masculinity. They’re about how we experience the world as something too big for a single human being to comprehend (yes, even a pope), the belief structures we cling to to keep that experience at bay, and the way those beliefs literally structure the fabric of our sensory interactions with the world, to the point where Lenny dies when he is abandoned by his parents yet again. Then again, maybe he doesn’t. It’s hard to say for sure.

That structural deftness is frequently unpleasant, and it’s not for everyone—a number of my friends have sheepishly admitted to stopping the first episode half an hour in, put off by the show’s sharp edges, its commitment to lethargy, and its reticence to be clear about what it’s up to. That’s okay, too. The Young Pope is many things—a brilliant, risk-taking television show, an endless source of campy humor, and a showcase for Jude Law’s continued acting talent and minor balding problem—but more importantly, it’s mine. That’s as much as anyone can ask for from a work of art, I think. That the show manages to do all of those things at once suggests that maybe it’s not unreasonable to expect TV to reach a little more, to stretch what it thinks it can do. The Young Pope might not get a second season, and even if it does, that season might have lost part of what made this one so spectacular, but it doesn’t matter. There’s a new pope now.

Eric Thurm’s writing also appears in GQ, Esquire, Real Life, and eventually in a book about board games he is writing for the NYU Press and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also the founder, producer, and host of Drunk Education, a comedic-academic event series that has absolutely nothing to do with TED.

Watch The Young Pope on HBO Go