The annual holiday tradition returns: I wrote about ten of the year’s best TV music cues for Vulture.

Grappling with the big questions?

Try The Young Pope and The New Pope (HBOGo/HBO NOW)

Here’s the deal: Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s outrageously bold pair of series take on the iconography and ideology of the Catholic Church with a sly sense of humor and a knack for surreal visuals. The Young Pope stars Jude Law as Lenny Belardo, an “incredibly handsome” American elected Pope by his brother cardinals, whom he comes to rule with an iron fist. The New Pope, which is simply The Young Pope Season 2 by a new name, introduces John Malkovich as Belardo’s successor, the dandyish Englishman Sir John Brannox. Fully loaded with eye candy, both shows grapple head-on with the power of faith and the mystery of love—or is that the other way around? Your jaw will drop even as your mind expands.

I wrote a guide to 10 off-the-beaten-path shows to binge-watch during quarantine for Decider. This one was a long time in the making—I hope you dig it!

When it finally happens, the meeting of the Young Pope and the New Pope is an anticlimax. It’s not the confrontation, the clash, the climax promised by the opening credits, which feature Sir John Brannox leading a procession from the right-hand side of the screen while Lenny Belardo strides across the beach in his skivvies from the left, presaging a showdown in the center that never arrives. It’s just Pius XIII in the garb of a simple priest, walking into a room where John Paul III waits for him. It happens so simply and so quickly I didn’t even realize what I was looking at.

And that’s just one of the ways that the season finale of The New Pope, one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen, defies expectations.

I wrote about the finale of The New Pope for Vulture. It was a pleasure and a privilege to write about this extraordinary show, the best thing about which I can say is that it was worthy of its predecessor.

I could go on, and on, and on. It’s that rich a show. It’s a show rich enough to actually merit the comparison to Twin Peaks that all “weird” shows get—it’s that accomplished and sophisticated, that bold, that sexy, that sad. And for a brief moment in this shitty world, it transported me with its belief in the power of love to make the world less shitty. For me, it turned “love thy neighbor as thyself” from a dimly remembered concept from Catholic school into an imperative, into a beacon of hope that such love is still possible. I don’t even know what to say about a TV show that can pull that off. Thank you, I suppose?

I reviewed this past Monday’s extraordinary episode of The New Pope for Vulture.

I want to close these thoughts on this exceptional hour of television by noting that Lenny says something interesting about heaven to Eva and the doctor. After whispering his detailed knowledge of the place into the ear of their son, who weeps a single tear after hearing it, he later explains that heaven is exactly like Earth, “except it’s not the same, because in heaven, we glimpse God.” On a smaller, less cosmic scale, I think this is what The Young Pope and The New Pope offer audiences. This is a very real world, a world of cigarettes and sex, politics and personal grievances, dead dogs, dead brothers, sick children, sickened parents. Except it’s not the same as our world, because on The Young Pope and The New Pope, we glimpse … not God, I suppose, but Art. That’s close enough.

I wrote about the seventh episode of The New Pope for Vulture. This was some TV, boy howdy.

I’ve thought about this tumultuous, remarkable episode quite a bit, and the connective tissue seems to me to be the issue of desire. Desire can make a person beautiful through the act of feeling it, the way Attanasio became beautiful to Ester through his desire for her. Not being desired can make a person feel ugly, the way Sofia sees her own face distorted in a mirror after the truth about her husband comes out. A lifetime of not being desired, the kind of life Brannox has experienced after the death of his brother, leaves one searching for something to fill the void — religion first, then drugs when that won’t do. Follow the love: That’s where you’ll find failure. It’s harsh, but at times at least, it’s true.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The New Pope for Vulture.

More than any episode of The New Pope yet — and this is saying something — this one has sex on the brain.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The New Pope for Vulture.

I appeared on the latest episode of Fanbyte’s The New Pope podcast Papal Bull: Resurrection to speak with hosts Merritt K and Eric Thurm about the show, Catholicism, Marilyn Manson, and much more!

Picture two people. Then picture a wall between them. Now imagine that this wall is permeable, so that human connection can take place through it. Even so, the wall is a barrier that partially obscures the identity of the person on the other side, preserving anonymity, or at least the illusion thereof.

Congratulations: You have just imagined either a Catholic confessional or a glory hole. What this episode of The New Pope asks is, porque no los dos?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The New Pope for Vulture.

More than any other show on television today, The New Pope understands the value of unusual human faces. In addition to Orlando’s Cardinal Voiello, its core cast includes the saturnine, frog-faced Cardinal Aguirre (Ramón García); the effete and angular Cardinal Assente (Maurizio Lombardi); the beady-eyed, mononymed Vatican operative Bauer (Mark Ivanir); the soft-tempered and soft-featured Cardinal Gutiérrez (Javier Cámara); Kiruna Stamell, a little person, as the Abbess of the Vatican’s cloistered nuns. Of course, there’s the new pope himself: John Malkovich’s Sir John Brannox, his deeply lined face framed by a scraggly white beard, deep-set eyes recessed even further by generous helpings of guyliner. Creator and director Paolo Sorrentino’s closeups, particularly striking when the whole College of Cardinals is gathered together in all their red-robed splendor, make a meal out of every one of them.

My new column at The Outline is about the unconventional (read: normal) faces of The New Pope.

“You remind me of my favorite actor, John Malkovich.”

“Doesn’t do much for me.”

It feels too easy, somehow, to lead a review of an episode of television as rich as The New Pope’s third installment with the cheap pop of a fourth-wall break. But that’s the thing about The New Pope: It can make easy meta-jokes, like Cécile de France’s Vatican PR maven Sofia Dubois telling John Malkovich’s character that he looks like John Malkovich, and still be an enormously affecting and visually spectacular meditation on desire, duty, family, sex, and the need for human connection even in the face of extraordinary obstacles. Hell, it even can crack wise about Megan Markle floundering in her role as royalty—a reference that wound up being unbelievably timely—and still feel more like a poem than a gossip rag. That is its power.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The New Pope for Vulture.

If Seinfeld was a show about nothing, The New Pope, like its predecessor, The Young Pope, is a show about everything. Everything important, anyway. Love, faith, sex, death, shame, grief, God, lust, politics, violence, orgasms, depression, art, poetry, music, hope — all of it coming at you faster than you can keep up with, all of it wrapped in a package as beautiful as one of the bespoke suits worn by Sir John Brannox, the man who will soon be … well, you know.

I reviewed last week’s fantastic episode of The New Pope for Vulture.

Have you heard the Good News? We have no longer forgotten to masturbate!

Yes, Lenny Belardo, the erstwhile Pope Pius XIII, must be spinning in his non-grave: Before the opening credits of The New Pope, Paolo Sorrentino’s daring new sequel to his 2017 masterpiece The Young Pope, even roll, a nun jerks off after giving Belardo’s comatose body a sponge bath. This kind of sexual excess was literally the stuff of Lenny’s nightmares, with that famous line about self-love popping up in an anxiety dream prior to his first address to the faithful. After the cliffhanger heart attack at the end of last season that we learn left him comatose, who will guide his flock now?

That’s the subject of the first episode of The New Pope, and the answer is not who you think it is. To wit, it’s not Sir John Brannox, the English prelate played by John Malkovich. Before his ascension, there’s papal-political hardball to be played among the College of Cardinals whose responsibility it is to select Pius XIII’s successor, and the game goes horribly awry.

Meet The New Pope, same as The Young Pope, insofar as they both whip ass. I reviewed the season premiere of The New Pope for Vulture, where I’ll be covering the show all season long.