Showtime Renews The Tudors For Fourth And Final Season

Showtime has renewed the historical melodrama The Tudors for a fourth and final season. The pickup consists of 10 episodes that Showtime says will dramatize King Henry VIII’s last two tumultuous marriages, to Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr. The new episodes will continue the show’s current quickened matrimonial pace of going through two wives per season, a narrative strategy that was planned from the show’s outset given that Henry’s first two wives (Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn) were the best known and most influential.

The final season will air next spring and be written by series creator Michael Hirst, who in a display of prolific energy is single-handedly writing all 38 episodes of the saga. Ending The Tudors also frees him up to work on a Camelot project he’s developing for the network.

With Showtime recently rejecting several other projects, including an L-Word spinoff, there’s likely to be a slot or two available and if Camelot follows the Tudors model, the project would be picked up straight to series.