When HBO first announced The Young Pope, the world braced for controversy. The trailers showed a baby crawling over a pyramid of sleeping adults, Jude Law chain-smoking behind the Vatican walls, and nuns playing basketball. What audiences received in 2016 was not just a show, but a stunning, surreal, and deeply philosophical meditation on faith. The Young Pope Season 1 is not a conventional political thriller about the Vatican; it is a psychological epic painted in the colors of Caravaggio and scored to the beats of techno music.
Created by Paolo Sorrentino (the Oscar-winning director of The Great Beauty), the first season is a self-contained masterpiece of 10 episodes that asks a singular, terrifying question: What if the most radical, intelligent, and ruthless mind in the world sat on the throne of St. Peter?
It is impossible to discuss The Young Pope Season 1 without bowing to Jude Law. The actor delivers a career-defining performance that is both terrifying and heartbreaking. Law’s Lenny is a bundle of contradictions: a chain-smoking, Cherry Coke Zero-drilling prelate who kneels in ecstatic prayer; a manipulative tyrant who weeps alone in the Sistine Chapel. The Young Pope Season 1
Sorrentino films Law like a fashion icon. The close-ups are brutal. We see the pores, the ice-blue eyes, the curl of smoke from his lips. Yet, Law injects a palpable vulnerability. In one of the season's most famous scenes, Pope Pius XIII delivers a homily to an empty St. Peter’s Square, shouting "God is not a genie!" while his voice cracks. Law manages to make arrogance feel tragic.
He is supported by a stunning ensemble: Diane Keaton as the nervous, well-meaning Sister Mary (his surrogate mother and now his advisor), and Scott Shepherd as the ambitious Cardinal Voiello, who serves as Lenny’s Machiavellian foil. When HBO first announced The Young Pope ,
Here’s a feature-style exploration of The Young Pope Season 1, focusing on its themes, style, performances, and cultural impact.
The series opens with the improbable election of Lenny Belardo, the first American pope in centuries, a pontiff who combines doctrinal rigidity with contrarian eccentricity. Sorrentino leans into contrasts: ancient rituals and modern media; divine claims and human frailty; solemn ceremony and absurd spectacle. The tone shifts between reverence and irony, often landing in a liminal space where the sacred looks performative and the performative hints at the sacred. Here’s a feature-style exploration of The Young Pope
For all its flamboyance, The Young Pope is a serious theological work. It rejects both easy atheism and saccharine faith. Lenny’s core belief is that God is terrifying—a hidden, silent, demanding presence. He refuses to offer comfort because comfort is a lie. “What you need,” he tells a desperate woman, “is fear.”
But the season’s arc dismantles his own defenses. Lenny prays not out of love, but out of rage and need. He wants a sign. When he finally receives one—in the form of a miracle involving a dying boy, a confessional, and his own tears—it’s ambiguous. Is it grace, or just chance? Sorrentino refuses to answer.
The final shot of the season is iconic: Lenny, now humbled and vulnerable, walks into a massive crowd at St. Peter’s. He looks up at the sky, whispers “I do believe,” and the screen cuts to black. We don’t know if he’s lying, converted, or simply exhausted. That’s the point.
Lenny is a loner, but he can’t rule alone. The supporting cast forms a tragic, Shakespearean court: