Kings and popes, pay-TV style

When we first meet the future King Arthur tonight in Starz’s “Camelot,” which is just after the title sequence, he’s fooling around with a young woman who looks like a modern Playboy centerfold and is wearing just as much clothing.

Obviously, we aren’t talking Lerner and Loewe and Richard Burton here, or even Richard Harris.

We are talking premium cable, which frequently gets to the gratuitous nudity as soon as possible, just in case you’ve forgotten that you’re not watching “regular” TV.

The adult content in “Camelot” shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has seen Starz’s lurid “Spartacus,” which was so sexually explicit and graphically violent to be almost comical.

What might come as a surprise is “Camelot’s” relative restraint. This is an earnest, and occasionally dreary, re-telling of the Arthur legend, certainly not as over-the-top as “Spartacus” or any of the other period dramas becoming more common on premium cable.

It’s a tale of sibling rivalry between Arthur (Jamie Campbell Bower), initially unsuspecting heir to an English throne, and his half-sister Morgan (Eva Green), who believes the throne is rightfully hers, and who killed her father as part of her quest to get it.

“Camelot” is hampered by a weak Arthur in Bower, a veteran of the “Twilight” series. It’s one thing for him to be portraying a callow, youthful Arthur; it’s quite another for him to look like he walked off a 1976 Peter Frampton album cover.

The series’ high points belong to Green as the wicked Morgan and to Joseph Fiennes playing Merlin. Fiennes may rely too much on one expression – a sort of half-scowl combined with a wry smile – but when Merlin and Morgan get going, the wizardry brings a magic (artistic and otherwise) that’s otherwise missing.

“Camelot” was created by Michael Hirst, who also wrote “The Tudors,” the Showtime series that helped (along with HBO’s “Rome”) lead pay cable to its current pseudo-historical-drama obsession.

Hirst is also a writer on “The Borgias,” which debuts Sunday on Showtime and has a lot in common with “Camelot.”

Both series feature a central character whose rise comes after a leader’s death. Both feature elaborate coronation scenes. Both have baroque poisonings, femmes fatale, family divisions, and people who want to knock the central characters off their lofty perches.

Both also have a lot of characters speaking in British accents, which makes less sense in “The Borgias,” where several British actors portray members of a 15th-century Spanish family.

What “Camelot” doesn’t have, and sorely needs, is Jeremy Irons, who dominates “The Borgias” as Rodrigo Borgia, who through bribery and cajoling becomes Pope Alexander VI.

Irons is a great actor who is aware that sometimes a project calls for great bad acting, and he not only chews the scenery in “The Borgias,” he savors it.

Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game,” “The Butcher Boy”), the series’ chief executive producer and a director of several episodes, brings his vivid visual style to the project, which also gives it a boost beyond what is really a soap opera in period clothes.

Now we’ll just have to wait a couple of weeks to see how HBO’s period fantasy “Game of Thrones” (premiering April 17) compares with both.