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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Gavin Richardson, post: 2724361, member: 83956&quot;]So I just finished watching ROMAN EMPIRE: REIGN OF BLOOD, a six-installment series on Netflix. Each installment is probably about an hour or a little less. And yes, it’s as over-the-top as the title implies. It should simply be titled THE RISE AND FALL OF COMMODUS, because that is its subject. I give it 2.5 stars out of 5. Here are four observations on the series.</p><p><br /></p><p>1. This series is a weird hybrid of styles. Part of it is traditional history documentary, complete with academic talking heads and a narrator. Yet intercut with these documentary gestures are long sequences of live action, complete with some steamy scenes and topless women. The show sort of wants to be a serious documentary, but it also sort of wants to get HBO <i>ROME</i> numbers, and in trying to do both, it doesn’t do a particularly good job of either. Imagine a History Channel documentary with b**bs, and that’s pretty much what you’ve got. Now I’m no prude, and I can appreciate a beautiful woman as much as the next guy, but the partial nudity really felt programmatic and crassly exploitative. Commodus himself generally keeps his clothes on, but he looks like he would be more comfortable on a male swimsuit or fireman’s calendar. Forget the curly-headed and bearded Commodus. This Netflix Commodus is ready for a daytime soap opera. Or the beach.</p><p><br /></p><p>2. The academic talking heads in these episodes are generally pretty good. Some are highly academically pedigreed, others not so much (and I say this as one whose academic pedigree is not especially eye-popping). But all do a decent job of painting a “life and times” picture of this emperor in an engaging fashion. I do, however, wonder how they feel about contributing their scholarly <i>gravitas</i> to a series that is pretty sensationalistic in so many ways.</p><p><br /></p><p>3. The production values are pretty good, but not great. There are a few cool shots of a reconstructed Colosseum, with birds flying out from behind it, at a distance. I hope you like that shot, because it gets reused about 15 times during the course of the series, as do 2-3 other transitional shots. A few interiors are reused time and again, also suggesting a limited budget. So visually, the series is just sort of okay by contemporary standards.</p><p><br /></p><p>4. In my view the series is a bit uneven. Most fascinating, to me, were the middle episodes, as Commodus deals with the Senate (and Cassius Dio), as well as with Commodus’s duplicitous right-hand man Cleander. But the show creators clearly want the highlight to be Commodus’s stint as a gladiator. Indeed, the whole series opens with Commodus entering the arena, and the documentary then flashes back to begin with Commodus being called to the German front by Marcus Aurelius. Commodus’s megalomaniac move to become a gladiator occupies the final two episodes, but it really only needed one. The fifth episode felt so slow to me that I even fell asleep a few times. It seems that the writers were really stretching their material for the last two episodes.</p><p><br /></p><p>At this point you might ask, “So if you were so underwhelmed, why did you watch the whole series?” Ah, you got me. Clearly there was something in this series that kept me watching. I can’t be like the man in the restaurant joke: “Hey waiter, this food is terrible. And such small portions!” The truth is I was intrigued by some events that I was unaware of, such as the rumors of Marcus Aurelius’s death that prompted Faustina’s treasonous (?) alliance with an Eastern usurper. And I didn’t know anything about Cleander. Indeed, the middle episodes of this series are pretty solid.</p><p><br /></p><p>So if you are interested in Commodus, or Roman Imperial history in general, you might check it out. Just don’t expect Ridley Scott’s <i>Gladiator</i>, though the series does court those associations. Also know that it might not be a family-friendly show given the violence and nudity. <i>Caveat spectator</i>.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80096545" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80096545" rel="nofollow">https://www.netflix.com/title/80096545</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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