As soaps go, The Tudors isn't a bad one: it's almost always watchable even when it isn't very good. That said, I was never convinced that Hirst was writing the show he thought he was writing; in the interviews I've read, he describes characters much more rounded than the ones we see on the screen. At one point, after Henry VIII has rejected papal supremacy and initiated the English Reformation simply so he can marry Anne Boleyn, his chief minister Thomas Cromwell describes him as, in fact, "a true Catholic, except this one thing: he would have neither Pope, nor Luther, nor any other man set above him" -- and although that's the character's observation, it's pretty much how we see Henry as well: as a man of no real convictions, a narcissist who'll rewrite, ignore or subvert any laws of church or state to meet his needs. As for Anne Boleyn, Hirst was apparently struck when critics called her a "manipulative bitch," because he intended something more fully realized, but it's hard to see how, since from the moment she appears on the scene, pimped out by her bastard of a father, she has her eyes firmly set on the crown. (Hirst gives her a few sympathetic scenes right before she gets axed, but that's Soap Writing 101, and we see right through it -- it humanizes her, but it certainly doesn't "redeem" her.)
