Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The New Pope’ On HBO, A ‘Young Pope’ Sequel Where John Malkovich Takes The Papacy From A Comatose Jude Law

Three years ago, Paolo Sorrentino brought us The Young Pope, which imagined what would happen if a young, hunky, American cardinal ascended to the papacy. At the end of that first miniseries, Jude Law’s Lenny Belardo, now known as Pius XIII, collapsed from a heart attack. In The New Pope, Pius is still around — just not conscious — and the search is underway for a new pope. Read on for more…

THE NEW POPE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman gives a sponge bath to the comatose Lenny Belardo, aka Pope Pius XIII (Jude Law), in a very gentle and loving manner, while his heart monitor beeps in the background.

The Gist: After Pius’ heart attack, the beloved pontiff has been in a coma for some time; three heart transplants haven’t worked. As he hovers between life and death, there are calls to make him a saint by fans in the Vatican as well as from parishioners. But Cardinal Voiello (Silvio Orlando), the Vatican’s secretary of state, has a bigger issue: He thinks it’s time to find a new pope.

With all the scandals going on in the Catholic church, plus the direct threat from fundamentalist Muslim terrorists, Voiello feels that the church needs a leader to rally around. When he meets with his closest advisors, they eliminate various people for seemingly petty reasons. Then he suggests himself. His advisors think he’s too short.

During the conclave, though, he’s just not breaking through with the college of cardinals; a look-alike candidate is getting most of the votes, as is a mysterious cardinal named Sir John Brannox (John Malkovich), who isn’t even in Rome at the time. So Voiello convinces his advisors to convince other cardinals to pool their votes for various candidates and put them behind a candidate who Voiello thinks he can control.

But his plans backfire when the nervous new pope — who calls himself Francis II — suddenly “realizes he has power,” and decides that the Vatican should allow refugees into its gates, sell all of the church’s assets and spend all of its billions on helping the poor. And, since the seemingly naive pope was the confessor for Pius and the other higher-ups in the Vatican – including Voiello — he’s ready to clear house, including defrocking his secretary of state. Not long after that, Francis II has a mysterious heart attack, as Voiello and his cohorts plan on going to England to visit Brannox and convince him to take the job.

Our Take: The New Pope, written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, has the same mischievous undertone as its predecessor, 2017’s The Young Pope. What we’re seeing in this sequel series, though, is a little bit more of the inner workings of the Vatican, with Sorrentino more heavily leaning on the hypocrisy that’s latent in the Catholic Church, rather than how a new, hunky American pope can reform it.

What’s interesting about the first episode, though, is how little happens in its 58 minutes. Pius is in a coma, Voiello tries to rig the election, and he gets bitten in the ass by it. We get it; there’s a lot of stylistic elements to the Young Pope/New Pope series, with lots of cloistered women dancing and masturbating and getting all hot and bothered over the hot, young pope in a coma. However, it felt like the stylistic elements, like the extended sequence of the college of cardinals entering the Sistine Chapel for the conclave, were more there as time fillers, which was proven when we didn’t even get a glimpse of Brannox until the credits were rolling at the end of the first episode.

The second episode was better, as Voiello and his advisors — including Sofia (Cécile de France), the Holy See’s marketing director — travel to Brannox’s estate to try to convince the “fragile” cardinal to take the papal job. Without the counterweight of Malkovich, and before him Law (who appears briefly in the first couple of episodes as a “presence” in everyone’s lives… at least until he finally wakes up, as we see in the trailer), Voiello and his crew come off as creepy, robotic and detached. It’s why the first episode had such an odd, surface vibe to it while the second dealt in real human emotion. We’re not sure we were looking for a Vatican version of VEEP, and that’s what the first episode felt like in a lot of ways.

Once Brannox becomes pope, though, we’re not sure where Sorrentino is going to go. Will he dive into substantial issues or just stay on the surface?

Sex and Skin: The woman sponge bathing Pius put up a finger as if she was about to perform an act of self-love. There’s more sex and nudity, especially involving Sofia, in the second episode.

Parting Shot: We see the body of Pius, laid out in his neon-cross-decorated quarters. And, despite his coma, all of a sudden we see a finger move.

Sleeper Star: Mark Ivanir plays Bauer, who works for the Holy See as a cleaner of sorts. Did he have anything to do with Francis II’s death? Who knows? Also, Ludivine Sagnier is still floating around as Esther, trying to strip-mine her fleeting fame for having what she deemed a “miracle” baby with Pius’ help.

Most Pilot-y Line: A sequence where various cardinals prayed to get a particular type of pope — conservative, open to other sexualities, forgiving of the pedophiles in the group — was overly long and fairly on the nose.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The New Pope definitely takes its stylistic cues from The Young Pope. But we’re not sure what Sorrentino has to say about the church that he didn’t already say three years ago.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Watch The New Pope On HBO Go

Watch The New Pope On HBO NOW