This year, the creative, controversial filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino took home an Oscar for best foreign film (for his very odd but very beautiful La Grande Bellezza) and now he’s setting his sights on the small screen. Tentatively titled The Young Pope, Sorrentino envisions a complex, compelling drama about a scandal-ridden Vatican helmed by a flawed, fictitious American pope in the vein of Tony Soprano and Walter White—so it sounds like it’ll be very non-controversial and nobody will have any complaints about it at all.
Nobody’s been cast yet and no distributor has been selected, but the idea is well-formed. “The series is about dreams, fears, conflicts, battles, the search for meaning and the need for love of a pope, seen through Sorrentino’s unique vision capable of creating worlds that are at the same incredible and more real than reality itself,” said Lorenzo Mieli and Mario Gianani, whose Italian-based Wildside company will act as the show’s co-producer …