Which one is better? Two of these shows were made, both lasting three seasons. One was made for a bunch of countries originally (broadcasting in France, Austria, Italy, and Germany) and is now mostly a Netflix exclusive…and the other is the Showtime original series.
I want to start one of them, but I don’t know which one I should watch.
I’ll probably wind up watching both, eventually.
I already know the Showtime one will probably be more gritty, filled with more sex and nudity and swearing and violence and probably taking the “more entertaining than factual or clever” route. I just don’t know if that made for a better series, overall, than the other one.
Although I’ve seen all of The Borgias, I only saw the first series of Borgia, so I can’t offer a completely fair comparison. But then again the main reason I gave up on Borgia was because it was so inferior to The Borgias.
The Borgias has the much better cast. Its biggest problem is that Jeremy Irons makes an unconvincing Alexander VI, but he is nevertheless very watchable. He is also nowhere near as badly miscast as John Doman. While every bit as bad as you would expect, its scripts at least recognise some of the moral ambiguities involved and Irons is actually rather good at playing around with those. They also make more effective use of the possibilities of the CGI to create the right look. Whereas almost everything about Borgia comes across as cheap rip-off. Or to put it another way, Borgia is an inferior imitation of The Borgias, which was an inferior imitation of The Tudors, which was never especially good in the first place.