Chris Todd

The HBO/BBC miniseries "Rome" wrapped up a few weeks back, and I've got to say that it was my favorite new show of the season (though the entire concept of a "season" appears to be lurching towards irrelevance). As I was explaining to someone else, it's the best fantasy television series ever made, excepting that it sort-of kinda actually happened and has no dragons. But if it did have dragons, it'd kick even more ass.

(Reminds me -- I've always been surprised that no one has gotten around to optioning David Drake's Killer for a movie. The story of a Roman beast catcher attempting to aprehend a hostile alien in ancient Rome seems like a winning pitch.)

Anyways, "Rome" turned out to be one of the most watchable, purely enjoyable series that HBO has yet produced. All of the various HBO series are top-notch in terms of art and craft, but this is the first one in which I felt a true affection for the characters in all their various pursuits, however noble, ignoble, misguided, or honorable they happened to be.

The series got off to something of a rough start in the first episode, dropping us into the middle of a tumultuous period of time preceding the collapse of the Republic with little context for either the historical proceedings or the characters at hand. But once introduced to Titus Pullo and Lucuis Vorenus -- two ahistorical characters who wind their way in and out of the actual history -- the story really begins in earnest. Neither character is exactly what they seem: Pullo a brutish legionaire taken to drinking and whoring, but also posessing a small, inarticulated idea that there should be more to life; Vorenus the very model of an efficient, professional centurion, but one who finds himself severely tested away from the battlefield in the world of politics and in his own bedroom. In spite of their differences, the two become fast friends and find themselves involved in a game whose dimensions would ultimately reshape the world.

All the characters are fascinating in one way or another -- I particularly liked the depiction of Caesar as fiercely intelligent, charismatic, and vain all at once, and the charmingly amoral take on Marc Antony. I likewise enjoyed the portrait of Octavian as an adolescent whose intellect goes beyond precociousness and well into Hannibal Lector territory. Most of the other adults, including his own mother, treat him as an amusing oddity, but his keen grasp of the political machinations at work eventually attracts the attention of Caesar. Historically, Octavian would eventually be adopted as Caeser's heir and become the first great emperor of Rome, but here he plays the sometime-third Musketeer to the team of Titus and Pullo -- you could have easily just spun the three of them off into their own series. I have to admit that there's a certain Kirk/Spock/McCoy interaction at work in their relationship...well, okay, only if McCoy routinely knifed people to death and shagged prostitutes. But you get the idea.

There's no way of knowing with any degree of certainty what the "real" historical figures were like, and thus no way to know how accurate any of these portrayals are -- most of the texts concerning this period in time were written well after the fact. But in terms of storytelling, the charcaters feel real, and all of them evolve in ways that are both interesting and natural. There are two particularly unique things about the setting, though, that I haven't really seen elsewhere before.

First is the idea of magic, or in this case, the gods. For anyone living at the time, they were as real as your next door neighbor. People knew there were gods because, well, that's how the world worked. Why else did the sun come up, or a person die, or a nation lose a war? It's part of the reason that "Rome" feels so much like fantasy -- when Servilia bloodily sacrifices a bull in order to place a curse on someone, and then later something bad happens to that same someone, who's to say it wasn't because of the gods? The deep-seated, unquestioning credulity with which the characters accept the idea that the gods play an active role in human affairs gives a kind of strange verisimilitude to the mystical aspects of their lives that other, purely fantasy stories seem to lack.

Second is the concept of morality, or in this case, the lack thereof. I was struck by something I'd read in the EPK material, where one of the producers noted that Judeo-Christian morality simply didn't exist at the time. Laws -- and the enforcement of laws -- was still something of a novel idea, and even enforcement was done with the kind of brutality that modern society shies away from. And, of course, the concept of "law" was somewhat subject to interpretation anyways, and certainly didn't include women, children, slaves, the poor, or the unlucky. So it's something of a shock to have one of the protagonists deal with the ups and downs of the slave trade, or watch another character stop his cohort in mid-march down a road so that he can have his way with some unlucky peasant girl who's caught his eye. As Arthur said in Camelot, "might makes right," and it's interesting to watch otherwise sympathetic characters struggle in such a world without the benefit of our (sometimes, hopefully) more enlightened moires. It also adds to the reality of the story -- or, I should say, doesn't detract from it in the same way as other historical stories that perform backflips not to alienate modern sensibilities.

A second season is due in 2007, and the usual HBO priced-like-every-disc-was-stamped-of-gold DVD box set should be out sometime in 2006.