The Young Pope (Season 1)

The Young Pope (2016) is Paolo Sorrentino's HBO drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. Jude Law plays Lenny Belardo, the first American on the throne of Saint Peter, who takes the name Pius XIII and almost immediately scares everyone who voted for him.

The cardinals wanted someone they could steer. What they got refuses to be photographed, chain-smokes in the papal apartments, and demands a fierce, unfashionable kind of faith. Silvio Orlando's secretary of state quietly wages war on him from across the table. Diane Keaton, as the nun who raised him in an orphanage, is the one soul Lenny trusts. Underneath the gold and ceremony sits an abandoned child still furious at the parents who left, now steering a billion believers.

Co-produced by HBO, Sky and Canal+, the series looks like nothing else on television — Sorrentino shoots Vatican corridors and liturgy as borderline hallucination, scored by Lele Marchitelli. Ten episodes, a closed arc later extended in The New Pope. Come for a cold, witty meditation on power and belief rather than reverent costume piety. Stream The Young Pope online on iFILM.