Ellen Gray: 'Tudors' back with King Henry & his wives

THE TUDORS. 9 p.m. Sunday, Showtime.

As Showtime's "The Tudors" heads into its fourth and final season on Sunday, I've been thinking a lot about Katherine Howard and Jesse James.

The fifth wife of Henry VIII and Sandra Bullock's soon-to-be-ex might not have hit it off if they'd met: History records no tattoos for the doomed teenage queen, who's nonetheless been stamped a tramp for centuries.

Yet on the surface they both seem to have lived dangerously.

That James' stunt-filled Spike series, "Jesse James Is a Dead Man," hasn't actually touched on the perils of screwing around on one of America's sweethearts doesn't make the title less apt.

Fortunately, we don't execute people in this country for adultery these days. We don't even banish them from golf courses.

Which makes the young queen, played by Tamzin Merchant in "The Tudors" as a sexy and only occasionally endearing dimwit, the real daredevil.

Howard, who married a king who'd already executed her cousin, Anne Boleyn, on charges, probably trumped up, of adultery and incest, proceeded to sleep with one of her new husband's own men, a decision that in retrospect seems akin to a young girl's accepting a ride in Ted Bundy's Volkswagen with full knowledge of his past crimes.

I hope it's giving nothing away to say that Katherine won't be with us for the whole season.

I've occasionally been lukewarm in my enthusiasm for "Tudors" creator Michael Hirst's interpretation of Henry's life and times and critical of Showtime's insistence on telling sometimes monstrous stories in the prettiest possible way.

And maybe something is lost in our not seeing the aging king as the corpulent being he's said to have become by the time he married someone young enough to be his daughter. A mildly padded Jonathan Rhys Meyers, even with a festering sore on his leg, still makes for a pretty good-looking king.

But I've come to admire Hirst's sex-charged costume drama for its deft blending of gossip and governance. Henry's six wives still form the thread of the narrative, just as they always have, but it's impossible to have stuck with "The Tudors" for this long and not learned a great deal about the nuts and bolts of monarchy and about the forces beyond sexual desire that drove the man to do the things he did.

I wouldn't recommend taking every word of "The Tudors" as fact, much less citing it in a term paper, but as historical fiction, it's proven remarkably robust.

(Next up on Showtime from Hirst, who's written every episode of "The Tudors": "The Borgias," created by "The Crying Game's" Neil Jordan and with Jeremy Irons as the patriarch of the notorious Renaissance dynasty.)

Perhaps Rhys Meyers' refusal to morph into the trademark Hans Holbein portrait of his character has freed him to focus on Henry's less physical traits, from his quick wit to his quicker temper. Season 4 finds him signing death warrants right and left, and you quickly realize that a man doesn't have to be physically imposing to be terrifically frightening.

Joss Stone returns as Henry's discarded fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, a woman bright enough to know a narrow escape when she sees one. It seems to be a relief to Henry when they see each other again, and it may be a relief to viewers, too.

Because though the series strives to do its best by each of Henry's queens, Katherine Howard remains a tough sell. As willful as any CW bad girl but only half as bright, she's at best a reminder that it's not just men who play dangerous games. *

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