Mike Asks: Have You Seen The Tudors?

Following up on my interest in Henry VIII that was generated by reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, I started watching the Showtime dramatization of his reign, which just wrapped up with its fourth season this year. The Tudors provides some very high drama, the kind you would expect with a philandering king drunk on absolute power, willing and able to slaughter his enemies (who were most often his friends just the day before), and subject to mood swings befitting a four-year-old. The writers take quite a bit of artistic liberty and don't pretend to be historically accurate, so don't get upset when events that took years to play out happen in the span of one episode, but the courtly intrigues and skillful acting by Jonathan Rhys Meyers more than make up for any of that.