The new television drama series, The Young Pope, created and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, started off strongly.
For the first two or three episodes I felt that Sorrentino was cementing his reputation as one of the greats, but, alas, less than halfway through, the HBO series lapsed into the formulaic bathos of a common melodrama. It slowly revealed itself incapable of being the traditionalist critique that it seemed to promise at first. This was a far worse failure for me than The Great Beauty (La Grade Bellezza).
