Well, there goes my ‘Borgias‘. My father likes to tell people he had to badger me for YEARS to get me to watch it… in reality we had to wait years for me to have a time in which I can watch wildly questionable TV (containing swearing, sex and violence) without some overly impressionable young eyes and ears in the room.
Yes dad, I loved it. Jeremy Irons has been the man since before I was born, and age has done nothing to lessen his talent. The other two in the power trinity for the show, François Arnaud who plays Cesare Borgia, and Holliday Grainger who plays his sister, the infamous Lucrezia Borgia, are equally as brilliant. Holliday presents a beautiful and innocent girl who wants nothing more than to live and love her family, transforming into a strong, worldly and capable (if somewhat damaged) woman through her various trials. Indeed I’d say Halliday stole the show, and controlled every scene she was in, with Jeremy and Francois reaction to her steel-sheathed-in-satin performance.
The Borgia’s doesn’t pull any punches, and as such wont be for everyone. It’ll appeal to people who were into things like Rome, and Game of Thrones. For the mad history buff, there is an amount of artistic license, but as a bit of a truth Nazi myself I found the overall feel to be more than enough to compensate for those niggly little things they decided to change (though I still can’t work out why they turned a relatively well born Bravo into a low-born homosexual? Although, God help me, Sean Harris gave a seriously good run for Micheletto and was the absolute best of the secondary cast members in my opinion).
Word is that there will be a 2 hour TV movie to wrap up the story. I hope so, I can handle the end as it sits, but it would be a lot better if the story could go up to the death of Alexander Sextus (Jeremy Irons). We will sit with fingers crossed.

