The Young Pope

Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope launched on Sky Atlantic in October 2016 (with HBO carrying the U.S. broadcast) and was nominated for the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series at the 69th ceremony in September 2017, the first Italian production ever nominated in a major Emmy drama category. Sorrentino directed all ten episodes of the first run himself, and adopted the same approach for the 2020 follow-up The New Pope.

Jude Law plays the central role across the two seasons. Sorrentino had been writing toward a Vatican-set narrative for years before the production: his earlier feature Il Divo (2008) had engaged extensively with Christian Democratic Italian politics, and The Great Beauty (2013) had directly visited the curia in its closing sequences. The series was widely treated by critics as the natural extension of the Sorrentino-Servillo Italian-feature filmography into long-form serialised television, with the same themes of beauty, power, mortality and Catholic ritual that had defined his cinema work.

The cast across the two seasons pairs Law with John Malkovich (lead of The New Pope), Diane Keaton, Silvio Orlando, Cécile de France, Javier Cámara and Stefano Accorsi. Cinematography is by Luca Bigazzi, Sorrentino's longtime feature collaborator. The series was shot largely at Cinecittà in Rome on rebuilt Vatican-interior sets and at numerous real Italian locations including the Villa Medici and the Palazzo Spada. The Vatican itself officially condemned several individual sequences and refused permission for any actual on-site shooting; the production worked entirely from external research and reconstructed sets.