Rome Season 2
Mai-Kero
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Registered User regular
Season Two of HBO's Rome begins on January 14th. It will be fantastic.
Wikipedia:
The series is a historical drama depicting the period of history surrounding the violent transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire; a change driven by the class struggle between Patrician and Plebeian (in Latin the patricii and the plebeii), the decay of political institutions, and the actions of ambitious men.
While showing the lives of the rich, powerful, and "historically significant", the show's perspective is centered around the lives, fortunes, families, and acquaintances of two Roman soldiers: Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, two soldiers mentioned in Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
The first season depicts Caesar's civil war and Julius Caesar's rise to absolute dictatorship over Rome, and his subsequent fall, between the end of his Gallic Wars (52 BC or 701 ab urbe condita) and his assassination on March 15, 44 BC (the infamous Ides of March). Against the backdrop of these cataclysmic events, we are also shown the young Octavian, growing up as the young man who is destined to become the first Emperor of Rome: Augustus.
While unsubstantiated by an official press release, Bruno Heller remarked in an interview that he would prefer the second season to concern the power struggle between Octavian and Mark Antony following Caesar's assassination.
Personally, I feel Rome is easily one of HBO's top series, and it has a special place in my heart alongside Carnivale. The next season is set up to be as amazing as the first, so I feel we could use a discussion thread about it.
Please be kind and spoiler the fictionalized elements of the show, although the general history bits are safe to talk about considering they happened over two thousand years ago. If there is a statue of limitations on spoilers, that might be it.
In any event, enjoy the show, because this is likely the final season, thanks to it costing a ridiculous amount of money to make.
My thoughts: Octavius will be awesome, and Titus Pullo will again be responsible for everything that happens ever.
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I also cannot wait for Octavian being a badass.
[spoiler:ad49371d2c]He won't.[/spoiler:ad49371d2c]
I loved the first season and infected many of my friends with it.
The trailers for season 2 of Rome are on the HBO website, and my god does it look awesome. Lots of yelling and hitting people.
Wikipedia says that there won't be a third season.
Nah, Rome had nothing to do with Deadwood being axed. The only show Rome killed with its huge budget was itself. Deadwood finished because Milch grew tired of it, pretty much.
[spoiler:a5b268750e] yes he will[/spoiler:a5b268750e]
[spoiler:3af83ff700]Not as Octavian, though...[/spoiler:3af83ff700]
Are you trying to avoid spoiling ancient history for people?
Oh, anyone interested in dramas set during Roman times should check out I, Claudius. Much better than Rome, and it's got Boss Nass from the Phantom Menace as Augustus
I knew it would be awful from the moment I saw that they had made Rome dirty. Rome was a gleaming jewel of the ancient world, the rest of the world was full of horse manure so that Rome could have polished marble buildings and thousands of fountains. Rome was advanced, cultured and beautiful. Admittedly their morality was hugely different from ours, bu that is the interesting bit.
Also Caesar was far too old, and all the wealthy characters were ridiculous. The soldiers were OK, but assigned far too much modern morality.
All in all it was a show with an excellent concept, that never failed to dissapoint utterly. I may look briefly at the second season, but I doubt I will waste my time with it.
Anyone really interested in that period and looking to really enjoy something made about it should read the Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCollough. Once you've read that you will see how the characters presented in Rome are just pale shadows of the men they really were and how the whole of Roman society was far far more interesting and enthralling than this series made it look.
Fuck yes. I, Claudius is awesome.
I don't really care about having perfectly realistic, or even partially realistic depictions of the setting, when I still get a good show out of it. It doesn't have to be accurate to be good.
You are grossly misinformed.
Republican rome was, by in large, a shithole.
Also, nitpicking actor's ages is incredibly lame.
In fact, your whole post was lame. Try again.
Also who told you Rome was a shithole? They were wrong. Do you realise how wealthy both Republican and Imperial Rome were based on slave labor and tax farming? Rome was not medievil london, which is what it looks like in this series.
I was hoping for interesting portrayals of Roman politics and life, using the diverse (and frankly amazing) cast of charecters present at that time. Marius, Caesar, Sulla, and Pompey ( a group of men who would define the next 500 years or more of history) all knew each other ! Instead we got a few old geezers plodding around in a medievil city. Perhaps I might have enjoyed it some extent if I hadnt read the books I talked about earlier, but after reading them it could never be anything but an utter dissapointment.
Rome had only a handful of marble buildings before Augustus came to power ("I found Rome brick and left it marble"). It was, for all intents and purposes, very similar to the Rome we see on the show. This is confirmed by archeological and documentary evidence. For example, vast sections of the Republican Rome were lost because fires spread quickly through the - largely wooden - buildings.
Rome had slaves pre-Imperial era, sure - but its economy was still relatively limited, and its political climate non-condusive to grand public works. It was not the "gleaming jewel" you seem to imagine. It was a growing metropolis, inhabited by an estimated 500,000 people and millions of animals, with no public ammenities to speak of, and limited hygene practices. It was plenty dirty.
Ciaran Hinds, the actor who played Caesar, was younger than Caesar himself was at the time of his death (Hinds 51 at the time of filming to Ceasar 56)! Furthermore - by Roman standards - Caesar was already an elderly man by 44 BC.
Maybe if you knew some actual Roman history, as opposed to what you've gleaned from another fictional source, you'd come off as less of an idiot.
Same here, seemed like HBO was riding the Gladiator wave a few years too late. I'm surprised there was a 2nd season.
Well when the alternatives are game shows and reality crap, I don't think riding the coat-tails of a successful movie is so bad.
And that view ignores the fact that Gladiator was utter tripe, and Rome was a well-written drama.
Righto then, so it was just a terrible TV show from its inception rather than being bad due to historical mistakes. I apologise for my misconceptions, however I still believe the way the charecters were portrayed made them into vaguely boring versions of themselves.
Caesar in particular came across as a weak and sick charecter, when in fact hiding his illness (epilepsy? gout?) was vitally important to Caesar. Perhaps the weakness of the charecter increased my perception of his age. Also remember that it certainly wasnt impossible for a Roman to reach his 70s if he was wealthy and well cared for (Gaius Marius Lived to be 71). Caesar in particular was renowned as a man of few vices, and so could have expected many more healthy years ahead of him. He was after all at the point of his death about to head off on another war, not the act of a man who was expecting to die soon.
Perhaps Rome was not quite so glamarous as I might have believed, but I still think the series would have been better if they had moved away from the image of "ancient city = dirty city" at least in the patrician and government areas. Even the square in front of the Forum was portrayed as being straw ridden and covered in graffiti! I can take your point that my image of Rome may be more appropriate to the height of the Imperial Era, but the end of the Republican era was still a point of great wealth for Rome itself due to the revenue raised by raids into foreign states.
After all by this point in its history Rome did already have multi storey apartment buildings and all sorts of other 'modern' features. The city they portrayed just looked too generically medievil.
Well thats how we know you're gay.
I accept that now, I just think they made the whole place look like a shithole. My idea of 'proper Rome' is I guess more suited to the Imperial Era, but I think the city they showed was more appropriate to the Medievil period, if not even less advanced.
And no it wasn't, unless the portrayal changed greatly later in the series. Straw in the streets, narrow roads, everything crusted with filth. Stereotypical middle ages/medieval setting.
I understand that this would have been the case for much of rome in the Republican era, since as I have now learned Augustus did much of the important rebuilding and reforms. However many pseudo - modern buildings would already exist, from shopping malls to apartment blocks and the central forum areas and the wealthy areas would have been kept clean and had wide boulevards free from straw and horse poo etc. Rome was already incredibly rich, its just that the emperors hadn't spent loads of money keeping the citizens happy yet, so those citizens with money would already have enjoyed a high quality of life.
Caesar hid his epilepsy in the show, too, and I wouldn't call him weak.
A lot of "Roman history" is complete bullshit cooked up during the Romantic period when Europe's artists were raiding the Roman aesthetic for design inspiration. Rome was never a gleaming white city, because the Romans painted their marble buildings and statues bright colours, for example.
The Rome of the TV show is just one interpretation of what Rome looked like - but it's a very pragmatic, well-reasearched, and sensible interpretation.
And yes, the Romans had raided foreign states - but none of the states that they had raided by that stage were particularly wealthy, either (look at the Goths - Caesar's main conquest). It wasn't until Augustus conquered Egypt that Rome started getting the revenue/food it needed in order to expand.
One of the main characters lived in a multi-story apartment.
Come on now. You can't tell me with a straight face that, along with all of it's flashy special effects, Gladiator actually had a worthwhile story. It is one of the most vastly overrated movies of the 90s, and one of Ridley Scott's worst.
Yeah, it's a pretty stupid argument, really. Rome has more roots in Shakespeare, story-wise, than it does in actual history, and any interpretation of ancient Rome is going to be filtered through a whole host of different lenses.
However, a lot of effort was put into the physical look and feel of the show - so while it is an artistic interpretation, it's also in line with a lot of modern research and scholarly interpretation. You can fault Rome for a lot of things, but they did cover their bases as far as the historical accuracy of the look of the show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gndEwMUgbo8
THRITEENTH
Depends how angry the guy holding it is :P
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One thing I love about HBO is that they seem to (usually, anyway) know when to end a series. Especially with heavily plotted dramatic series, there's a point where every show should end, and HBO, moreso than any other network, seems to do well in figuring out what that point is (rather than killing shows early, or letting them run too long)
And yes, I'm including Carnivale in the list of shows that stopped right when they should've, and I blame the creator for trying to turn it into something more than it was and leaving it unfinished.
I would have liked one more season of Deadwood, though. But maybe that's just me.
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They've shown a tendancy to play hard and fast with the timeline (ie, Cesarion being conceived and born in the same episode), so another season could certainly work - but I think you're probably right.