HBO executives are doubtless congratulating themselves for their “courage,” but it doesn’t take any courage at all to skewer the Catholic Church today. When will they be courageous enough to take on Islam, which, with the rampant human rights abuses occasioned by Sharia, would be fertile ground for a lurid miniseries like The New Pope? Oh, around never.

“Column: HBO — Vicious to Christians, Silent on Muslims,” by Brent Bozell and Tim Graham, NewsBusters, February 15, 2020:

HBO is currently running a dark little miniseries called The New Pope, which is basically a reboot of 2017’s The Young Pope. Both sprang from the mind of Italian creator Paolo Sorrentino, and both are scabrously anti-Catholic, which never hurts you with the elites in Manhattan and Hollywood.

The Young Pope starred Jude Law as the first American pope, painted as so doctrinaire that he wanted to end the sexual abuse problem by drumming all the homosexuals out of the priesthood. A papal aide protested: “It would be a war that would leave the ground littered with corpses, Holy Father. Do you want to know how many corpses would litter the ground?” The pontiff replied “Two-thirds of the clergy.”

Then each man compared the Church to a Third World dictatorship.

The New Pope stars John Malkovich as an effete English pontiff who threatens to shred the Bible and open the Church to gay marriages. The first show ended with Jude Law’s pope having a cardiac arrest. Now he’s in a coma, after three failed heart transplants. First, the Cardinals elected a Franciscan named Francis II, but he proposed selling off all the church’s wealth, so they had him killed. Then they turned to the Malkovich character, who’s named John Paul III. This is a wicked little joke suggesting John Paul I – who died 38 days after his installation in 1978 – was bumped off…

Speaking of pure mischief, it makes you imagine the possibilities of the Bill Maher Channel going off in a different direction, with a mischievous miniseries called The New Ayatollah. Instead of uncorking wild and crazy conspiracy theories in Vatican City, it could be based in Tehran. Iran’s highest religious authorities can all be shown to be corrupted by power and addicted to sex. Hollywood celebrities could drop by to demand the Koran be upgraded.

Somehow the Christians are always caricatured, and the Muslims are never touched. So how brave are these godless show runners?