'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' review: The best series of 2025 (so far)

WHAT IT'S ABOUT In the spring of 1536, King Henry VIII's (Damian Lewis) second wife, Anne Boleyn, dies on the chopping block as he plans his nuptials with Jane Seymour (Kate Philips). Meanwhile, chief minister to the king Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) deploys his powers of persuasion to save the King's only daughter, Mary (Lilit Lesser) from the chopping block. Under intense pressure, Cromwell needs guidance himself, and often imagines what his old friend and mentor, Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce), might say to him. (Wolsey died six years earlier.)

This six-parter, based on Hilary Mantel's "The Mirror & The Light" covers the last four years of Cromwell's life. (Mantel died in 2022.)

MY SAY Refracted through Rylance, Cromwell's gift is chiefly a Machiavellian one. He can read everyone's motives and to a point their minds. Of friend or foe, he knows their fears and vulnerabilities, and how to use those against them, or to help them. He's a master of the long silence, but also of the arched brow that others read as empathy, pathos — or pity.

Speaking from beyond the grave, his only confidant Wolsey warns him that "we've entered an age of coercion. Be careful, Thomas." But why should Thomas worry? He's the coercer-in-chief, who's even got the king on his puppet strings. Rylance's Cromwell doesn't have hubris, but arguably something worse under the circumstances: He's got self-confidence. History, or at least TV, has taught us his kind of story will not end well. They rarely do.

After 10 long years, "Wolf Hall" is back at last to finish that story. The first installment was based on Mantel's "Wolf Hall" (2009) and "Bring up the Bodies" (2012), but this second had to wait on the publication of "The Mirror & The Light" in 2020. "Wolf Hall" was among the best series of 2015, while this already seems destined to be among the best of 2025, and for all the same reasons — superb cast, excellent direction (Peter Kosminsky has returned to finish the job) and immaculate costume/ set design. Rylance's performance was impeccable then, still is.

What's different this time around is the world — our tortured world of 2025. By that suggestive title alone, Mantel may have hoped her magnum opus also held up a mirror to the 21st century, while you could easily do the same with this six-parter.

But why ruin a perfectly good TV series with politics? On one obvious level "The Mirror & the Light" is a cautionary story about the abuse of power — oft-told over the entire history of literature and television, by the way. It's those other levels that make this compelling. By humanizing Cromwell so deeply, Rylance holds up a mirror to us. His isn't the only humanizing portrait here either. There are many. Lewis's Henry VIII is a man-child who rages over imagined betrayals one instant, and in the next tenderly embraces one of those betrayers (his daughter Mary). He's hobbled by an infected leg, while his body has ballooned under those opulent robes; he's pitiful, and would be pitiable if he weren't chopping off so many heads.

Everyone around them is consumed with fear, self-doubt, and (above all) self-preservation. The court is awash in rumors and gossip, most relating to Cromwell. Rebels are pushing in from the north, and from the south in France. As the King's Mister Fix-It, Cromwell's job is to take care of everything and everyone, but forgets to watch his own back. He is pitiable, and doomed.

Imagine that 500 years later we'd feel anything for some remote figure of history? Yet that was Mantel's real point, and this series' too: Human affairs have always been messy because humans are involved.

BOTTOM LINE TV's best of the year, so far.