Borgia: Faith And Fear: Season One

Watching Lionsgate’s Borgia: Faith And Fear and Showtime’s The Borgias is the perfect example of how two very different creative people can get different results from the same material, even as that material naturally forces them to dovetail in certain ways. It’s easy to see why the story of Rodrigo Borgia would entice the sorts of people who make adult-themed cable dramas. It’s packed with sex, violence, political intrigue, and men in positions of power behaving badly. But where director Neil Jordan took his Showtime series to places informed by the conflict between religion and carnal desires, Tom Fontana, veteran of St. Elsewhere, Homicide: Life On The Street, and Oz, takes the Lionsgate series—which was an international co-production between France and Germany that debuted in Europe and aired first in the U.S. on Netflix—to places far more earthy and grounded.
The two series cover roughly the same period of time: Rodrigo Borgia’s ascension to the position of Pope and the immediate and chaotic aftermath surrounding his election. Where The Borgias focuses on—and makes great use of—the idea of hypocrisy within religion, however, Fontana seems more interested in the human interactions behind the politics of the Renaissance church. Jordan was fascinated by the ghoulishness of the period, by its obsessions with ritual and death; Borgia features much more in the way of nudity and violence and people getting chamberpots of shit thrown in their faces.