Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as King Henry VIII in the historical TV series The Tudors. (CBC)

As The Tudors winds down to an undoubtedly dazzling series finale this week, it's time to reflect on all that the Gemini Award-winning drama has given us over the past four seasons.

The Tudors' mercurial king makes mob boss Tony Soprano look like just another grumpy patriarch.

Michael Hirst's series boasts richly drawn characters, fabulous costumes, a grim esthetic and love scenes that would make Hugh Hefner blush; a co-production between Canada and Ireland, it has become one of the most complex and engaging adult dramas we've ever produced on these shores. But its greatest achievement lies in the extraordinary depiction of its central character, Henry VIII. As a portrait of ruthlessness and unremitting narcissism, The Tudors is unparalleled.

There's no real resemblance between the famously rotund, ginger-haired historical figure and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the Hugo Boss pitchman who plays him, but the performance makes us quickly forget that. Intense doesn't quite cut it when it comes to capturing Meyers's portrayal; possessed is a more accurate descriptor. He has completely absorbed the role. His Henry is a fire-breathing dragon, a primitive creature of catastrophic emotion. (Why he's never been formally recognized for the role — Golden Globe, anyone? — is utterly baffling to this viewer.)

Combined with Hirst's fantastic writing, Meyers has established Henry VIII as the jewel in the crown of a recent television archetype: the sociopath as leading man. The Tudors' mercurial king makes mob boss Tony Soprano look like just another grumpy patriarch.

The Tudors, which debuted in 2007, isn't the first TV drama to make the moral decline of its leading man compelling — The Sopranos, Dexter, even Mad Men take this route, too. But Tony, Dexter and Don have got nothing on the king.

To be fair, their civilian status is an impediment. Tony Soprano has the FBI, his wife, his kids and even his shrink to provide much-needed boundaries. Tony kills, steals and whores around, but he occasionally indulges in the fantasy that he has a conscience. Like Macbeth, he's plagued by nightmares, fears and anxieties. Even TV's first serial killer/hero, Dexter Morgan, has a moral code, albeit a perverse one. While Dexter aims to "protect the innocent," Because I said so! is as close as Henry gets to an ethos.

Henry's failures are greater because his power is limitless. The supreme ruler of his nation as well as its self-appointed religious head, he has no checks and no illusions about morality. He ends his 20-year marriage to Catharine of Aragon with the same enthusiastic brutality with which he later sends his second wife, the ill-starred Anne Boleyn, to the chopping block.

And that's how he deals with wives. What he does to his subjects and former advisers is downright horrifying: men are boiled alive and publicly disemboweled. The dead pile up around him — many of them innocent — and yet he sleeps like a baby. Remorseless and malicious, he has only become more dangerous with age and experience.

Henry has his pick of the English court's young beauties in The Tudors. (CBC)

He puts his former mentor, Sir Thomas More (Jeremy Northam) to death because he dares disagree with him — privately, no less. For Henry, the very idea of conscience has become a form of treason.

Oddly enough, it's Mad Men's slick ad man, Don Draper, with whom Henry shares the most in common. Both men have an intense appetite for novelty, a fixation with shiny objects that extends to the fairer sex. For Don and Henry, romantic illusion is infinitely preferable to the reality of enduring relationships. Marriage — even friendship — is too much work for both the king of England and the stud of Madison Avenue. Fortunately, Don doesn't have the divine right of kings on his side when it comes time to part ways. (And yet, he behaves almost as ruthlessly.)

When we first meet Henry in season one, he's almost sympathetic. (And boy, if he ain't handsome!) Married to a woman he doesn't love, the beleaguered Catherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy), he's besotted with the younger temptress, Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer). The king's in love for what appears to be the first time, and he wants to marry again. You almost feel bad for him, poor guy. As a ruler, he is almost as appealing. An intellectual, he proclaims his allegiance to the principles of humanism.

But when the Catholic Church denies him an annulment, the humanist turns fascist and the lover bares his fangs. He angrily breaks with Rome, declaring himself supreme head of the Church of England, and punishes his former wife for daring to claim her legitimacy. (They were married for 20 years!) It's an act of supreme arrogance that reverberates through every strata of society, provoking civil and religious unrest that continues for decades. Henry continually trumpets the necessity for obedience to his will, and yet not once does he consider his duty to his subjects.

By the time we arrive at season four, the lover, the intellectual and the humanist have evaporated, replaced by a shrieking despot who rejects the disappointments that truth can engender. He punishes those who would dare to bring him bad news and cavorts with a harem mere days after putting his fifth wife, a teenage Catharine Howard, to death. Lousy husband, brutal king — oh, Henry, where did it all go wrong?

Time has wrought a great change in Henry, and not for the better. He's more selfish, cruel and dangerous than when he started. In the end, it's clear that absolute power has corrupted Henry absolutely. The portrait of human nature isn't pretty. But you can't deny the artistry of it.

The series finale of The Tudors airs Nov. 23 on CBC.

Flannery Dean is a writer based in Hamilton, Ont.