Genre Watch: Dirty Sexy Royals

Jia's post made me think about an article I read in Time months ago around the time of the premiere of the Showtime series, The Tudors. It is one of the most gloriously (if over-the-top) salacious shows that I've ever watched on TV.

Rebecca Winters Keegan notes:

For audiences who like their history juicy, relatable and full of comforting moral certainties--which is to say pretty much everybody without a Ph.D.--there may be no better subject than young Henry. He was a rock star in a glittering, perilous age, an intellectually curious, athletic charmer who became a uxoricidal, paranoid turkey-leg chomper, pursuing a male heir through six wives. It's a wonder it took the entertainment industry so long to fully exploit him--and the other Tudors too--since the period was one of the most scandal plagued in British history.

What we're seeing seems to be a cycle of historical "bodice-rippers." I think that term originates from those melodramatic romance novels with the erotically charged paperback covers. I know it's been called a demeaning term by fans of this..stimulating literary genre. But in the case of these films and television series, I think it's quite accurate. Clothes are literally be ripped off with uncommon frequency and skill. On The Tudors, passionate sex is basically a narrative motif. Very little is left to the imagination. In the last scene of the Season One finale, which seems to last for about five whole minutes of the show,King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn engage in some graphic umm genre pleasure. Apparently, Peter O'Toole is going to be featured in Season Two as Pope Paul III to class up the series a little bit. Though you may recall how highly Henry regarded the Pope's opinions...

This series trailer is from CBS/Showtime and does not actually contain any of the series' gratuitous nudity, which may be good or bad, depending on your outlook. It is still somewhat graphic, though. You might think it tells you nothing at all about the actual content of the series. You'd be mistaken.



And Jia's right, there's a lot more of this to come. The Other Boleyn Girl may be rated PG-13, but as Tiffany suggests in her comment, sex could be a major selling point to some audiences. Look at the casting of these films as opposed to portraits of these men and women. Obviously, Hollywood glamorizing history is nothing new, but the likes of Scarlett Johannson, Natalie Portman, and Jonathan Rhys Myers are really sexing up the historical genre. I'm not complaining though. I'll end with this, which is a (humorously fake) preview of the same series: