10 Silver Linings To Otherwise Terrible TV Shows

By Grace Murray /

1. The Tudors

At the top of the list we have possibly the televisual equivalent of chocolate cake: sumptuous to behold, almost too rich to consume, and absolutely terrible for you. Historian David Starkey, who admittedly seems to permanently exist in a state of mild righteous anger, described The Tudors as €œgratuitously awful€ for its many anachronisms and factual inaccuracies. The acting ranges from amateur dramatics to the sublime (Natalie Dormer is fantastic as Anne Boleyn), but it€™s marred by constant and exhausting exposition and some truly strange accents. The Tudors was the epitome of style over substance, but wow, it did have a lot of style. It takes a certain amount of guts to introduce Victorian carriages into Tudor England presumably purely because they look a lot better than the historically appropriate equivalent, not to mention to cast a male model as the notoriously overindulgent Henry VIII. It may be a silver lining its detractors can€™t quite stomach, but The Tudors rightfully garnered multiple awards for its costume and production design, and the result makes for some beautiful, if vacuous, television. Henry would likely have approved.