It’s easy to give “The Tudors” a tag like “Dirty Sexy Royalty,” but it’s also misleading, because it makes the show sound like more fun than it really is. Showtime’s drama (which airs at 8 p.m. today on Sunflower Broadband Channels 252 and 421) about a young King Henry VIII has always been in a kind of limbo: It’s too salacious and silly to be a prestige project, yet it takes itself too seriously to be a guilty pleasure. In today’s TMZ.com world, when a celebrity scandal seems to erupt every hour, you’d think this series would do a better job of making its own royal scandal juicier.

You can probably deduce from this that I wasn’t a big fan of “The Tudors”‘ first season. The second one, which begins tonight, gets off to a far worse start. Within the first few episodes, Henry (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) marries Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer), and like a lot of TV couples, they’re lot less interesting together than they were apart.

Dormer’s smirking, pouting take on Anne remains annoying, and Rhys Meyers (now sporting a boy-band sprout of facial hair) just glowers through his role.

There are, however, signs of hope for this season. Nick Dunning has grown more watchably nasty as Anne’s mercenary father, and Sarah Bolger makes a strong impression as Mary, the daughter of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Mary will grow up to become queen (“Bloody Mary”) and have a bitter rivalry with Henry and Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, who will become Queen Elizabeth I. But for now, young Mary provides Anne with a much-needed foil in a royally snippy scene. A ghoulish-looking Peter O’Toole also joins the cast this season to effortlessly steal a few scenes as the imperious Pope Paul III.

Strongest of all, though, is Jeremy Northam as Sir Thomas More, Henry’s friend and advisor turned condemned prisoner. Northam, a good actor, was underused in season one, but as More rigidly opposes Henry’s decree that the king is the head of the church on Earth, Northam becomes by turns more beatific and defiant, finally finding something to grab onto in the role. Northam is still in the shadow of the late Paul Scofield, who won an Oscar for playing More in the movie “A Man for All Seasons,” but at least he’s not obscured as much as he was in the first season.

Northam’s best moments come in the fifth episode, which barely made it under the wire for this review. Showtime was wise to send it in addition to the original four, because episode five is where this season shows signs of turning around. Anne’s inability to produce a male heir for Henry increases the tension between them, and that should grow, because anyone with even a casual knowledge of British history knows that Anne is ultimately doomed.

“The Tudors” still takes too many wrong turns on too flat a road, but maybe if we stick with it, it will start heading in the right direction.