The Young Pope Season 1

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.

The Young Pope Season 1 is not merely a show about a pope; it is a meditation on the loneliness of absolute power. Lenny Belardo stands on the balcony of St. Peter’s, looking down at a crowd he refuses to bless, and we realize he is the loneliest man on Earth.

Paolo Sorrentino crafted a haunting, beautiful, and often hilarious paradox: a story about a man trying to find God in a house that has forgotten Him. By the time the credits roll on the final episode, you will not be sure if you have witnessed a miracle or a tragedy. That ambiguity is the point.

Whether you are a believer, an atheist, or simply a lover of high-art television, The Young Pope Season 1 is essential viewing. Light a cigarette, pour a Cherry Coke Zero, and prepare for the most unforgettable Papacy in TV history. The Young Pope Season 1

Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5) Where to stream: HBO Max / Sky / NOW TV

The Young Pope Season 1 opens with the election of Lenny Belardo (Jude Law), an American cardinal who is taken from obscurity to become the first American Pope in history, taking the name Pius XIII. He is 47 years old—young by Vatican standards, devastatingly handsome, and utterly unpredictable.

Far from being a humble servant of God, Pius XIII is a reactionary. He refuses to show his face to the masses, smokes cigarettes constantly, and delivers fire-and-brimstone sermons that terrify liberal cardinals. He rejects the progressive agenda of his predecessors. He opposes abortion, divorce, and homosexuality not out of blind dogma, but out of a twisted, traumatic understanding of love and absence.

The season’s narrative engine is simple: Lenny did not want to be Pope; he was a compromise candidate engineered by the calculating Secretary of State, Cardinal Voiello (Silvio Orlando). Once elected, however, Lenny doesn’t play the puppet. He plays the tyrant. The first season follows his war against the various factions of the Curia, his manipulation of world politics, and his slow, painful unraveling of his own childhood abandonment.

Critics often dismiss The Young Pope Season 1 as merely "edgy" or "blasphemous." That reading misses the point entirely. The show is not anti-religion; it is fascinated by the death of belief in the modern era. For all its flamboyance, The Young Pope is

Lenny Belardo is a believer trapped in an institution run by non-believers. The cardinals care about real estate, donations, and media optics. The people want a smiling grandfather. Lenny refuses to give them comfort. He argues that modern Christianity has become too comfortable, too therapeutic. He wants to reintroduce the fear of God.

The season poses a radical question: Is it better to have a cruel Pope who genuinely believes in Hell, or a kind Pope who sees religion as a social club? By the finale, Sorrentino offers no easy answers. Lenny breaks down, confessing he has lost his faith—only to be "saved" by the possibility of a miracle. The final shot, where he turns his back on the crowd to address God directly, remains one of the most ambiguous endings in television history.

From the moment Lenny delivers his first homily—a shocking, fire-and-brimstone rejection of mercy and modernity—it’s clear this will be no feel-good story about a reformer. “God has abandoned you,” he tells the faithful. “You are alone. And so are we.”

Lenny despises the “marketplace of spirituality.” He bans smiling priests, replaces outreach with austerity, and threatens to shut down the Vatican’s charitable arms if they don’t prioritize doctrine over do-goodism. His first miracle? Terrifying a liberal cardinal into a heart attack with nothing but a cold stare.

Yet Sorrentino never lets Lenny become a cartoon villain. Jude Law’s performance is a masterclass in ambiguity. One moment, Lenny is cruelly mocking a nun’s devotion; the next, he’s weeping on the floor of the Sistine Chapel, praying to a God he’s not sure exists. His obsession with his absent, hippie parents (who abandoned him at an orphanage) drives his entire papacy. In a stunning recurring image, he walks through a crowded square, parting the faithful like Moses, but his gaze is fixed on a distant memory—a woman in white disappearing into fog. Rating: ★★★★½ (4

Following the success of The Young Pope Season 1, HBO released a follow-up titled The New Pope (2020), which continues Lenny’s story. However, the first season remains a complete work. It does not end on a cliffhanger; it ends on a mystery. You can watch these 10 episodes and feel entirely satisfied by the arc of Lenny Belardo—from monster to martyr, from orphan to father.

In the opening scene of The Young Pope, a pelican—the medieval symbol of Christ’s sacrifice—waddles through an empty, sun-drenched St. Peter’s Square. It’s surreal, beautiful, and deeply unsettling. Then we meet Lenny Belardo, the newly elected Pope Pius XIII. He is young, American, impossibly handsome, and chain-smoking his way through the Vatican’s gilded corridors. Played with icy precision by Jude Law, Lenny is not your typical pontiff. He is a radical conservative, a manipulative genius, an orphan haunted by abandonment, and, quite possibly, a saint or a sociopath—or both.

Created by Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), the ten-episode first season (2016) is less a conventional drama about the Catholic Church and more a hallucinatory, operatic meditation on power, faith, belief, and loneliness. It’s a show that dares to ask: What if the Pope was a rock star with the soul of a medieval inquisitor?

Upon release, The Young Pope Season 1 polarized audiences. Some found it pretentious; others called it a masterpiece. It garnered a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor (Jude Law) and won the David di Donatello Award for Best Series.

More importantly, it changed the aesthetic of prestige television. Suddenly, every drama wanted Sorrentino’s slow-motion, synth-infused, surreal style. The show was so successful that it spawned a second season titled The New Pope (2019), featuring John Malkovich as a rival pontiff, though fans often argue the tight, self-contained arc of Season 1 remains superior.

For the Vatican, the reaction was silent disapproval, which only fueled the show's mystique. Pope Francis reportedly refused to watch it, but Vatican journalists noted the series accurately predicted the infighting of the Roman Curia.