You’ve probably been in this argument. Someone brings up The Borgias — the Showtime series with Jeremy Irons oozing menace in velvet robes — and someone else immediately counters with Borgia: Faith and Fear, the Tom Fontana version that aired around the same time. And within minutes, the debate collapses into the same exhausted question: which one is more historically accurate?
It’s the wrong question. Completely, fundamentally wrong. And the fact that we keep asking it tells us something uncomfortable about how we consume stories.
Historical fiction was never about history. It’s about the era that produces it.
Think about it. The actual Borgia family lived in the 15th and early 16th centuries. We have letters, papal records, ambassadorial dispatches, trial transcripts. And yet, despite this mountain of primary sources, historians still can’t agree on whether Rodrigo Borgia was a ruthless schemer who bought the papacy or a shrewd politician operating within the norms of his time. The facts are there. The truth is contested.
So when two television productions — both airing around 2011-2014 — tackle the same family and arrive at radically different portrayals, the interesting question isn’t ‘who got the facts right?’ The interesting question is: what did each production need the Borgias to be?
Showtime’s The Borgias, created by Neil Jordan, gives us Jeremy Irons as a seductive, almost tragic figure — a man corrupted by power rather than born into corruption. The show luxuriates in beauty. The costumes gleam. The cinematography aches with golden light. It’s The Godfather in vestments, and it knows it. Rodrigo Borgia here is Michael Corleone: a man who wanted legitimacy and got something darker instead.
Fontana’s Borgia: Faith and Fear takes a different path. It’s grittier, longer, more willing to sit in the grotesque. John Doman’s Rodrigo is less magnetic and more transactional. The violence feels less cinematic and more institutional. Where Showtime gave you scandal you could enjoy like dessert, Fontana gave you scandal that tasted like medicine.
One show wanted you to fall in love with power. The other wanted you to feel sick for wanting it.
And here’s the twist nobody talks about: neither version is ‘the real Borgia story.’ They can’t be. Because the moment you adapt history for television, you’re not preserving the past — you’re interrogating the present.
The 2010s were obsessed with antiheroes. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos reruns on every streaming platform, Mad Men — we couldn’t get enough of charismatic men doing terrible things while we told ourselves we were watching ‘critically.’ Showtime’s Borgias fit that appetite perfectly. It gave us a protagonist we could desire and condemn in the same breath. That’s not 15th-century Rome. That’s 2011 America.
Fontana’s version, meanwhile, leaned into something else: the slow, grinding machinery of institutional corruption. It was less interested in whether Rodrigo was a ‘good man’ and more interested in how systems — the Church, the nobility, the law — bend around power. That’s not Renaissance politics. That’s post-financial-crisis anxiety wearing a cassock.
Every historical drama is a mirror disguised as a window.
You think you’re looking at the past. You’re actually looking at yourself, and the production is holding the glass.
This is why the ‘accuracy’ debate is so frustrating — and so revealing. When someone says ‘Showtime’s version is inaccurate because it softened Lucrezia,’ what they’re really saying is ‘I needed Lucrezia to be a victim’ or ‘I needed her to be a schemer.’ The historical record supports both readings. The choice reveals the viewer, not the facts.
And this isn’t just about the Borgias. It’s about every period piece you’ve ever watched and then googled ‘was this accurate?’ afterward. Chernobyl. The Crown. Vikings. Oppenheimer. We keep treating accuracy like it’s a binary — either they got it right or they lied to us — when it’s actually a spectrum of interpretation shaped by what the storyteller believes their audience needs to hear.
The danger isn’t inaccuracy. The danger is when we mistake a compelling narrative for a faithful one and then build our understanding of history on it. Most people will never read a scholarly biography of Rodrigo Borgia. But millions will watch a show about him and walk away feeling like they ‘know’ the story.
The most dangerous historical fiction is the kind that feels true enough to stop you from questioning it.
So the next time you find yourself arguing about which Borgia show got it right, pause. Ask yourself a better question: what does it say about me that I prefer this version? What does it say about us?
The Borgias have been dead for 500 years. They don’t care which show was more accurate. But the version you chose — that’s alive. That’s working on you right now.
FAQ
Q: But surely one of the two shows is objectively more accurate, right?
A: On specific facts — dates, successions, who died when — you can score them. But 'accuracy' in fiction isn't a checklist. It's an interpretation. Both shows get some facts right and some wrong. The bigger truth is that neither was trying to be a documentary; both were making arguments about power, corruption, and family. Judging them on fact-checks alone is like judging a painting by whether the colors are 'correct.'
Q: So what should I actually take away when I watch historical fiction?
A: Ask what the show needs its version of history to do. Is it making power seductive? Is it making institutions look inevitable? Is it giving you a villain to feel superior to? The story's function matters more than its fidelity. After watching, read one actual source — a letter, a chronicle — and notice how different the texture feels. That gap is where real understanding lives.
Q: Isn't this just a fancy way of saying accuracy doesn't matter?
A: No — accuracy matters, but it's the floor, not the ceiling. Getting basic facts wrong is lazy and corrosive. But getting facts 'right' while smuggling in a distorted interpretation is far more dangerous, because it's harder to spot. The shows that feel accurate are the ones you should question hardest, because feeling is not knowing.