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 gratuitously 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 its 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 cant 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.
