Something to watch tonight: The Young Pope & The New Pope

I star­ted the news­let­ter ver­sion of this web­site back in July 2023 and one of the titles that I have always wanted to recom­mend has been miss­ing in action – until now.

Paolo Sorrentino’s bit­ing reli­gious satire, The Young Pope, ori­gin­ally screened ten years ago but dropped off the Neon stream­er in New Zealand along with the sequel, The New Pope (2020). If, like us, you are a little bit tired of the usu­al stream­ing diet of space, crime and space-crime, you’ll find that Sorrentino’s Popes provide a strik­ing alternative.

When none of the lead­ing con­tenders for the role of pontiff can com­mand a major­ity, a com­prom­ise can­did­ate is chosen. He’s young (natch) and American and the powers behind the throne believe that his rel­at­ive inex­per­i­ence will allow them to manip­u­late him into main­tain­ing their luc­rat­ive and influ­en­tial status quo.

Instead, Lenny Belardo from Queens turns out to be strong-willed and sur­pris­ingly con­ser­vat­ive. Scornful of any­one who puts their own pos­i­tion over ser­vice to God, he rap­idly becomes a thorn in the side of the estab­lish­ment and a source of faith­ful mys­tery to many ordin­ary church followers.

But – as you would hope and expect – noth­ing is quite as it seems and – because this is a Sorrentino pro­duc­tion – even the sur­prises are weird and wonderful.

Jude Law proves to be a real heavy­weight as Belardo and he is well-supported by a qual­ity inter­na­tion­al sup­port­ing cast. The late¹ Diane Keaton plays the nun that raised him in the New York orphan­age that appears to be the source of his anger and his resolve. The bril­liant Italian act­or Sylvio Orlando plays the often out­wit­ting (and equally often out­wit­ted) sec­ret­ary of state Cardinal Voiello, Spanish geni­us Javier Cámara is the gentle Monsignor Gutierrez and Cécile de France is the Vatican mar­ket­ing manager.

10 epis­odes of intrigue, meta­phys­ics and often furi­ous debate about faith and its mech­an­ics later, and we are left with a cliff-hanger that was even­tu­ally resolved sev­er­al years later with a new series (The New Pope) and a new Pope – pitch-perfect per­fect John Malkovich.

Where to watch The Young Pope and The New Pope

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Digital pur­chase from Fetch

Canada: Streaming on Crave

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Sky

India: Streaming on Prime Video or Lionsgate Play

USA: Streaming on HBO Max

Further listening

I was pleased to be able to recom­mend both series to listen­ers of RNZ Nights last Friday, along with the new heavy met­al doc­u­ment­ary Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition and the 1982 New Zealand tax write-off Battletruck (aka Warlords of the Twenty-First Century).

1. Typing that stopped me in my tracks, let me tell you. ↩︎