It’s opening day of the Flavian Amphitheatre—which we now call the Roman Colosseum—and a ruler turns to the architect of the grisly festivities (giant crocodiles are somehow involved) to mutter, “Your taste in entertainment never ceases to appall.”
Funny, I was just saying the same thing to myself, after having sat through nearly 10 hours of over-the-top back-stabbing, front-stabbing, and assorted other types of murder and mayhem from the gutters to the palaces of debauched Ancient Rome. The credits for Peacock’s Those About to Die, exposing a naked desire for comparison with Game of Thrones-style with gushers of blood cascading through a scale model of the fabled capital, set the tone for a lurid melodrama of pageantry and perversity.
A throwback to pulp entertainment from a simpler time, though more savage in its leering approach to graphic carnage, this historical—or should I say hysterical—drama seeks to condemn a corrupt society constructed around spectacles of bloodlust while satisfying the same impulse among those who tune in. Let the games begin? As a curtain-raiser to the more civilized (we hope) events at the Paris Olympics which begin in just a week, Die is a wallow in unabashed, unashamed hokum. Popcorn TV with a blood orange chaser.
The anti-hero we’re meant to love to hate, or vice versa, is the colorful street-smart hustler Tenax (Iwan Rheon, a master of treachery as the original Thrones’ Ramsay Bolton), who describes the series’ mentality in a nutshell while planning the Amphitheatre’s grand opening: “Enough is good. More is better. Too much is perfect.” Too much is Die‘s sweet spot: Too many characters, each one either too noble or too villainous to register as human, too many interchangeable chariot races with distractingly fuzzy CGI, too much on-the-nose dialogue that keeps the eyes rolling: “This new arena they built in Rome: a river of blood for them, an ocean of money for us,” saith a slave trader.
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Tenax meets his match in the cunning Cala (Sara Martins), a scrappy mother from the African province of Numidia, who’ll do anything to secure freedom for her abducted children, two daughters sold into slavery and a son, Kwame (Moe Hashim), enlisted as an underdog gladiator. She joins Tenax in business at his gambling parlor, keeping the books while watching in bemused disgust as he climbs his way up the corroded social ladder through his connections with the chariot races and gladiator fights, all designed to quench the restless and malleable mob’s appetite for gruesome conflict.
In the classic tradition of old-school miniseries of the 1980s and ’90s, they’ve enlisted an Oscar winner—Hannibal Lecter himself, Anthony Hopkins—to add a dollop of dignity to the role of ailing Emperor Vespasian, whose choice of succession will decide Rome’s immediate fate. His sons couldn’t be more different: Titus (Victoria‘s Tom Hughes), the elder, a seasoned warrior; and Domitian (Jojo Macari), a sniveling schemer of almost comically transparent mendacity and cruelty.
As we hear a Spanish horseman say as he approaches the city walls: “So much for Pax Romana (Roman Peace).”
Indeed, what fun would that be? In Those About to Die (a title that applies to just about everyone), we’ll never know.
Those About to Die, Series Premiere (10 episodes), Thursday, July 18, Peacock
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