The importance of location to great fiction has been emphasised again and again throughout the current golden age of television. HBO’s run of seminal shows prove the rule. Whether it’s mobster New Jersey in The Sopranos or The West Wing’s corridors of power, a sound choice of location provides a platform from which complex and compelling human dramas can play out.
The struggle to find similar worlds to base new series on must be one that keeps HBO executives wide-awake at night. It’s a wonder, then, that it’s taken so long for them to get round to making a programme based in the Vatican. The behind the scenes political machinations at play in the White House, both the real and televisual one, surely have nothing on the infighting and intrigue that has gone on for centuries in the heart of the Church.
