Apologies in advance for the length of this post. It's something I have actually been thinking about a lot too.
'The Borgias' also didn't have as much promotion as other Showtime series. To be honest, in the US, everyone has heard of Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, and even The Tudors, but not as many people know about The Borgias unless they are specifically into historical drama. A lot of my friends have never heard of it.
However, 'The Borgias' is still better known than 'Borgias' because despite the lack of publicity, it was on Showtime unlike Borgias, which American audiences can only watch on the Internet/Netflix.
Secondly, Americans (unlike Europeans) sometimes find it hard to enjoy a show when all the characters are as unsympathetic as the ones on Borgias. The Borgias made sure to cast a lot of actors who were able to be charming, charismatic, and likeable despite their immoral characters. Borgias is less concerned with endearing its characters to the audience. While these characters might evolve over the series' three seasons, it's the first season which leaves the strongest impression and we have John Doman's Rodrigo, who is ill-tempered, cunning, ruthless, and corrupt without any of the humor or self-reflection found in Jeremy Iron's version (this is not a critique of Doman's portrayal - I'm just pointing out the differences and why a lot of Americans may find Irons' portrayal more sympathetic than Doman's). Lucrezia is insufferable in the first season as well - whiney, bratty, self-righteous, and prone to tantrums. Juan has no redeeming qualities (in this respect, both Borgias and The Borgias are alike). Cesare is too intense and prone to overacting/melodrama. Giulia is arrogant, manipulative, a fake friend, and is happy to ruin the lives of her 'friends' if it benefits her. Ascanio Sforza is changeable and switches sides whenever things don't go his way, while The Borgias' Sforza was a bit more sympathetic because of his loyalty to Rodrigo. Even Della Rovere is sinister in Borgias, so the audience can't root for the enemy either, whereas in The Borgias, Della Rovere seemed to be guided by his moral compass as much as his desire to become pope, which made it easier to empathize with him. The only two main characters that remain more-or-less likeable in Borgias are Vanozza and Alessandro.
A classic example of how The Borgias was better at eliciting sympathy for its main characters from an American audience would be the Lucrezia/Giovanni relationship. In The Borgias, Giovanni is set up as a villain from the start. He disses Vanozza to her children, looks like a jackass, abuses/rapes Lucrezia, and is condescending even when he tries to make peace with her. Lucrezia is set up as the heroine and victim, so the audience is forgiving when she has an affair with Paolo and even cheers her on when she lies about Giovanni's impotence in order to secure an annulment. Lucrezia is not a saint but the show often puts her in situations where her character is the heroine to someone else's villain (be it Juan or her in-laws in Naples), and she is often depicted as more intelligent and competent than many of the men around her. Borgias fails to do the same with Isolda's Lucrezia. They set up Giovanni Sforza as a kind, sensitive, handsome man who was widowed (instant sympathy for Giovanni). He falls madly in love with Lucrezia and does everything he can to please her. When he fails to perform in bed due to the intense pressure, she is never shown to even give him another chance to prove himself. She just moves on to the next handsome guy she sees, and then publicly humiliates her loving husband by claiming he is impotent just so she can get a divorce. Giovanni becomes the sympathetic character instead of Lucrezia, who is a main character constantly placed in situations where she is made to look villainous or insufferably foolish (e.g. her stint in the convent). For his show, Fontana favors an approach to Lucrezia that is perhaps more realistic of a self-absorbed and rebellious teen girl, but her less sympathetic portrayal does not endear her to Hollywood audiences as much.
I think both versions have their merits, both are entertaining, and both take liberties with history, but when it comes down to it, The Borgias crafted its characters and storylines to appeal to Showtime's largely American audience while Canal+ obviously crafted theirs to appeal more to European tastes. Americans need a strong hero (or at the very least, antihero) and/or a central romance they can get behind, which is why Hollywood movies and TV shows are the way they are. The Borgias had the audience hooked with the chemistry between Cesare and Lucrezia despite the incestuous set-up. Borgias pays less attention to that relationship and Cesare and Lucrezia are seldom even in the same scenes. There is no real central romance in the series that the audience cares about. This matters less to Europeans, but it will bother a lot of Americans who are accustomed to the Hollywood formula.
The other problem with Borgias for American audiences would be the mix of accents. When I asked my friends to give it a try, they gave up after one to three episodes because they hated all the random accents and found it too distracting. They wouldn't have cared if all the Italian characters had Italian accents, all the Spanish characters had Spanish accents, and so forth. But to them, it made no sense that some Italian characters have British accents while other Italians have Italian/German/other accents. They complained that even within the Borgia family, everyone had a different accent - and besides the fact that it was distracting and ridiculous, it made the production seem amateurish, since they couldn't even hire actors capable of doing accents different from their native ones. They felt that even if the cast was international, all the actors playing characters from the same family or same region/country should have been able to learn and execute a uniform accent - whether it's Italian/French/Spanish/English/German. One of my friends even said that it reminded her of bad college productions where some of the international student actors are not seasoned enough to do dialect work yet, so there is a weird mix of American, European, and Asian accents on stage even though they are performing Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams.
Most Americans I know also do not like Doman as Rodrigo. Even though he is American and people respect him for his work on The Wire, most feel he is miscast, and that the ultra-modern American accent he uses works against the pseudo-historic speech patterns in the dialogue. I think if he had used an older American accent or even a transatlantic accent (like the one Cora Crawley has on Downton Abbey), they would accept him more.
I admit that personally, I found the accent mixing and Doman's American accent jarring at the start. But I love the Borgia history so I kept watching and now I am enjoying the series. I think if other Americans kept watching, they would like it too but too many give up after an episode or two.
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