A Formal Complaint Against Showtime's The Tudors

I need to talk about Margaret Tudor, or rather the woman The Tudors claims is Margaret Tudor, because I have been carrying a grudge about this for years and it is time to let it out in public where people can see it.

The show has a reputation. Golden Globe nods, Emmy nominations, four glossy seasons, a permanent slot on every "best historical drama" list that gets passed around like a rumor nobody fact-checks. People recommend it to me constantly, with the same confidence they'd recommend a good dentist. I want it on the record that I have sat through all four seasons twice, out of what I can only describe as academic masochism, and I regret almost everything.

Here's the crime scene. Henry VIII had two sisters. Margaret married the king of Scotland and then, not content with one royal husband, remarried twice more. Mary married the king of France, watched him die within months, then secretly married Charles Brandon and had to buy her own brother off with a fortune to avoid losing her head over it. These are two entire women with two entire storylines, enough drama for a spinoff each.

The Tudors looked at both of these women and thought, you know what this needs, one woman. So they melted Margaret and Mary into a single character, kept the name Margaret, married her off to the king of Portugal instead of France, had her murder him in the plot (a flourish nobody asked for), and then handed her over to Brandon anyway.

Mary Tudor, a real person who existed and mattered, was simply absorbed, the way one sibling absorbs all the good stories at a family reunion. I have never fully recovered from finding this out. I tell people at parties. It has not helped my social life.

Then there is the matter of Henry's body, which the show treats like a state secret. By his forties the real Henry VIII weighed close to three hundred pounds. He had a leg wound from a jousting accident that never healed and apparently smelled dreadful, and doctors at the time linked his temper directly to the pain of hauling that leg around a palace for two decades.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, meanwhile, remains lean and smoldering for four straight seasons, jawline fully intact well past the point where the real king needed a chair carried between rooms. Watching a hot guy get moody is not the same experience as watching a man's body slowly betray him while an entire court pretends not to notice, and only one of those actually happened.

Cardinal Wolsey gets it worse, in a way, because his downfall is the best acted stretch of the whole show and they still couldn't leave it alone. The real Wolsey died of illness on the road while traveling to face trial for treason, worn out and still clinging to hope of a pardon, which is exactly the kind of slow, undignified ending that happens to powerful men who fall from grace. The show has him swallow poison instead, presumably because a vial reads better on camera than a man simply running out of road. It is tidier. It is also a lie, and I resent how much I cried at a lie.

None of this is because television cannot handle the Tudor court responsibly. Wolf Hall did it with a fraction of the dialogue and none of the fireworks and somehow ended up more devastating, because it trusted the audience to sit with an uncomfortable truth instead of handing them a poison vial and a wink. The Tudors had four seasons and a real budget to work with the exact same true story and chose, repeatedly, to file the serial numbers off actual women so the plot would move faster.

I still love parts of this show, mostly Sam Neill's Wolsey, who somehow generates more genuine grief in one scene than the rest of the series manages across four seasons combined. But I now keep an actual biography on the shelf next to the boxed set, purely so I have something to slam onto the coffee table when someone tells me they learned their Tudor history from Showtime. Give Margaret Tudor back her own name. Give Mary Tudor back her own entire, extremely eventful life. I will not be calmed down about this.