Billed as the “sordid saga” of the “original crime family,” the eight-week drama series premiered Sunday (April 3) on the Showtime network with an episode about the 1492 election of Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI.

Modern popes have had their fans and detractors, but few would dispute their reputations for personal virtue. That’s partly why the five most recent pontiffs—including John Paul II, who will be beatified on May 1—are under formal consideration for sainthood.

But as the new television show ”The Borgias” is about to remind us, it was not always thus.

Showtime’s website calls Alexander (played by Jeremy Irons) a “wily, rapacious” patriarch who followed his “corrupt rise” to the papacy by committing “every sin in the book to amass and retain power, influence and enormous wealth.”

Alexander, who reigned until his death in 1503, has gotten bad press since the 15th century. A contemporary critic, the zealous church reformer Girolamo Savonarola, even claimed that the pope was doing the work of the Antichrist.Unsurprisingly, Alexander eventually had him executed.

In his recent history, “Lives of the Popes,” University of Notre Dame scholar Richard P. McBrien calls Alexander the “most notorious pope in all of history.” Even William Donohue, the pugnacious head of the Catholic League who assailed Showtime for airing its “sensationalist” show during Lent, concedes that Alexander was an “extortionist who led a life of debauchery.”

How bad was he?

The Spaniard Borgia, the only non-Italian member of the conclave that elected him, made himself pope with the help of generous bribes, handing out offices and privileges accumulated since his uncle Pope Callixtus III had made him a cardinal at the age of 25.

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