dvr this
PBS, Sundays, 10 p.m.
The first episode of Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Book Prize winning novel, is sitting on my own DVR. One of the highest rated television shows in British history, it was also wildly praised by critics, and PBS’s Masterpiece is bringing it to the U.S. with great fanfare. It tells the story of Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), the cynical and powerful close aide to King Henry VIII (Damien Lewis), during the great crisis created when Henry left the Catholic Church and created the Church of England, all so he could divorce his wife. This story has been told before, most recently in Showtime’s The Tudors but also in the classic film A Man for All Seasons, but Mantel’s focus is less on the king than it is on Cromwell, making him an anti-hero in the vein of Frank Underwood, Kevin Spacy’s devious president in House of Cards.
