Video Maximus: HBO and BBC's Rome is Superlative

I was a little worried about BBC/HBO's new series ROME, in that in might not measure up to I, Claudius, which looms large in my mind as among the best things ever put on the business end of an electron gun. But it's absolutely excellent in all respects; like the Sopranos, Band of Brothers and to an large extent Carnivale, it's the sort of rare television I can't guess exactly how it was done so intelligently and so beautifully.

Why watch? From the synopsis:

Four hundred years after the founding of the Republic, Rome is the wealthiest city in the world, a cosmopolitan metropolis of one million people, epicenter of a sprawling empire. The Republic was founded on principles of shared power and fierce personal competition, never allowing one man to seize absolute control. But now, those foundations are crumbling, eaten away by corruption and excess. The ruling class has become extravagantly wealthy, with a precipitous decline in the old values of Spartan discipline and social unity. There is now a great chasm between the classes. Legal and political systems have weakened, and power has increasingly shifted to the military.

I'm sure none of you will draw any rash parallels. But the epic nature is tempered by careful attention to putting the viewer at the citizens' level - the food, the social spaces, the art, the impact of the classical period both deeply strange and deeply familiar - no mean feat. A wise choice is that the two lead characters are ordinary soldiers with unusual luck, a convienient fiction that is based on two real men in Caeser's own account. And it's the end of the Republic. Interesting things galore.

It would have been a cost (curiously it's hard to accept our voices set in classical situations), but it would have been interesting politically to see it done in American rather than British accents. Yet the casting is a seamless use of skilled (and in the case of Indira Varma heartbreakingly beautiful) actors but not overt celebrities; it eliminates the distraction of overknown stardom.