Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino wowed plenty of non-believers with his 2018 “limited” series Jude Law as the first American pontiff in what, for all intents and purposes, looked to be a potentially self-indulgent, heavy-handed criticism of the Catholic Church and its leadership. What he delivered instead— along with a phenomenal performance from Law, as Lenny Belardo, aka Pope Pious XIII — was a sumptuous, comionate, and sometimes surreal examination of the very human emotions, experiences, and lives that contradict the positions held by those in the upper echelons of the church and its governing body.
That the series garnered a second season — or sequel, if you will — with The New Pope was something of a surprise, though a welcome one, to say the least. For starters, the original series ended with Lenny collapsing after delivering a rousing speech and cementing his place in history. With Pius XIII seemingly out of play (he’s been in a coma for several months at the start of the new series), it becomes paramount for the church, and, more importantly, those vying for power within it, to hold a conclave and elect a new pope, hence the title.
Unsurprisingly, that proves easier said than done, as various factions within the Vatican have their own ideas of where the church needs to go and how it will or will not change along with the rapidly changing world outside its walls. Sorrentino expresses this much through the plight of Cardinal Voiello (Silvio Orlando), one of the more intriguing characters from the original series, and one who easily demonstrated the comic contradictions of these very human characters and their otherwise holy ambitions.
In The Young Pope, Sorrentino examined the push and pull of religion and the secular world, as well as the various bureaucratic machinations running the Catholic Church. This mostly unfolded within the context of Pius XIII initially being seen as not only a young upstart but also a potentially dangerous iconoclast, only to reveal his intentions were something else entirely. The New Pope, then, at least in the early episodes, sees its characters scrambling to respond to the situation Lenny has ostensibly left them in. They are, for the most part, unsure where to take the church and its followers, and, in a bit of meta-commentary, they are unsure how to follow up something so unexpectedly inspirational and, more to the point, provoking.
The series blatantly asks the question: Where do we go from here? And the answer threatens to see the Catholic Church backslide from where its now-comatose pope intended it to go. As the first hour demonstrates, there’s little in the way of consensus among the cardinals as to who should succeed Pius XIII, leading to a lengthy but nevertheless humorous conclave in which Voiello and his apparent doppelgänger, Cardinal Hernandez, battle it out to become the next pontiff. The result is an unlikely candidate who at first seems to be easily manipulated, but then upends the hierarchy of the church by attempting to address its most fundamental principles. Needless to say, there is another vacancy in the papacy before too long.
This is all a part of Sorrentino’s measured introduction to Sir John Brannox (John Malkovich), an eye-liner wearing, harp-playing aristocrat trapped in an enormous estate with his ailing parents who spend their days grieving John’s late twin brother, Adam. Sir John’s eccentricities and Malkovich’s understanding of them position him as an indisputable successor to Lenny, at least within the context of the show’s often beautiful efforts to blur the lines between reality and surreality. This is made even more apparent whenever Law appears onscreen, a heavenly body (sometimes literally, as evidenced by a sponge bath scene in the season’s early going) walking among the sinners of his congregation as they remain unaware.
The result, then, is another alluring, opulent, funny, but ultimately humane look at the levels of power within an enormous and enormously influential institution that is faced with the prospect of changing along with the secular world in which it exists. Through it all, Sorrentino opts not to judge, but to observe, basking in the pleasures of his characters’ various shortcomings and their occasional (and sometimes accidental) excursions into actual piety. It’s a remarkable follow-up to what was an occasionally extraordinary series, one that proved as thoughtful as it was original.
The New Pope premieres Monday, January 13 @9pm on HBO.