When they do eventually invent time machines, it’s ancient Rome that’s going to be booked solid for months as a destination. Sure, a lot of the people who are “saving to go to Tokyo” at the moment will go to feudal Japan and bring back a load of hand-crafted armour, but they will be in the minority. Some people will simply use it to go back to London in the 90s and watch an episode of The Big Breakfast being filmed before having sex with Robbie Williams. I’ll drag my girlfriend to Victorian Whitechapel – “No, it’s good! They have trains, and smog! We can wear grey clothes and solve that murder!” – and the whole trip will be so underwhelming I’ll have to take us on a big expensive fortnight in 60s New York as penance.
But, fundamentally, when time travel is invented your WhatsApp is going to be pinging with newly formed groups called “Ancient Rome trip”. You’re going to have to free up thousands of pounds for travel and a few gold coins for accommodation and the wine kitty. Every stag do for the rest of time will be to see bloodsports at the Colosseum, before watching a sculptor make an emperor’s marble bust. You’ll be stood next to someone’s mostly-silent friend-from-uni for an entire long weekend before Christ was born, and the only thing he’ll say to you is, “Mad how they’ve got underfloor heating, isn’t it? We haven’t even got that in the flat.”
Anyway, here’s Those About to Die (18 July, Prime Video), which will have to do until then. It’s a mega-budget swords-and-sandals epic, inexplicably starring Anthony Hopkins, who plays an ageing Emperor Vespasian as he has to choose a successor from his two sons, the warrior Titus Flavanius (Tom Hughes) and the unbearable Domitian (Jojo Macari). There’s a delicate power shift among Rome’s political elite; there’s a lot of chariot racing; there are queens who keep walking around at night with hoods on; there are slaves who through honour and great strength will make it to the top; there’s a lot of pouring wine out of big jugs. Blood spatters the sand. Hopkins walks slowly through a room and delivers a line of dialogue that you sort of forget the words of even while it’s actively happening. There’s a sweeping CGI shot of the city from above. Roland Emmerich directs it. Saving Private Ryan’s Robert Rodat writes. Iwan Rheon, an evil little boy who I always love seeing in things, stares through the slit of a door, plotting.
More than anything, Those About to Die represents a tangible shift in the TV trends over the past couple of years. It’s easy to watch the opening credits – a map of a city, orchestral music with choral singing, the sound of a sword, blood (or is it wax?) pouring through the sculptures – and just go, “Ah, right. It’s another Game of Thrones thing.” You’ll remember, when Game of Thrones first rose, that there was a clamour for hour-long TV dramas set in fantasy or historical lands, which didn’t really have any life to them but limped along for a season or two anyway.
The scenes in the pilot would always be: a young boy falls into a village’s grey mud while someone shouts “Oi!”; a golden young prince is mean to a servant; his mother, in another room in the castle entirely – played by an actor only eight years his senior – drinks wine and has an affair. Loads of that. It went away for a bit, thankfully, but there was a threat that, with House of the Dragon being as good as it is, it might re-inspire production companies to commission those half-ideas they were developing before Daenerys ruined the finale and killed the genre for a bit. Those About to Die isn’t quite that.
Instead, it’s more akin to Shōgun in that it’s a historical drama with enough intrigue and good actors and blood and guts and gore that it feels as if it’s got something to it. I would rebadge this genre as “historically accurate-ish”; there are some real names and people in there, and some real buildings that got built and assassinations that got assassinated, but there are also a lot of side-quests and side-characters that can only exist to keep the cogs of a big-budget TV show moving. And, honestly, that’s OK. It’s been hard to capture Rome on television – HBO’s Rome, obviously – and there have been a few doomed attempts recently that fell short (I am looking at you, Domina!).
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Those About to Die may succeed because it’s not shooting for 100% encyclopaedic accuracy; it wants you to watch another episode instead of retreating into a Mary Beard book for spoilers. Hark, the bell rings for another race day! Until those time machines come along, watching Anthony Hopkins stare into the middle distance and say something half-epic before cutting to some CGI may be the best Rome we’ve got.