The New Pope understands the value of unusual human faces -- more than any other TV show

The Outline

The HBO drama casts normal-looking people to such great effect, says Sean T. Collins. "the unorthodoxy of The New Pope’s faces helps emphasize the relative youth and traditional sexiness of the actors on the show who actually do look like the kinds of people you’d build a television show around: Jude Law as Pope Pius XIII, whose following is developing into an idolatrous cult complete with uniform sweatshirts bearing his picture, or Cécile de France as the Vatican’s PR guru Sofia Dubois...." He adds: "Many television shows, even many great television shows, have not shared The New Pope’s generosity toward unusual-by-TV-standards faces. Mad Men, The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, Mr. Robot — these prestige dramas were driven almost entirely by beautiful people. Game of Thrones, which started with a strong mix of actors, slowly whittled its cast down to a cadre of the young and the sexy. Sometimes the socially condoned sexiness was the point, as in Mad Men’s examination of how being extraordinarily hot affected Don Draper and Joan Holloway differently based on their gender. Sometimes it was just a perk the filmmakers could adroitly exploit, like how creator Sam Esmail and his cinematographer Tod Campbell used special lenses to better capture the exceptionally round and luminous eyes of actors Rami Malek, Portia Doubleday, and Carly Chaikin. But something is lost, too, when a cast is uniformly Hollywood-hot, and you don’t need to endure the blandly attractive casts of a network police procedural or superhero show to understand this."