Peacock's chariot-racing drama is ghoulishly violent, cartoonishly soapy, and too formulaic to transcend the macho fantasies of its makers
The Roman Empire haunts the minds of men, as the women of TikTok recently discovered and reported to the world. That preoccupation doesn’t seem so silly when you think about the American Empire in 2024; we’ve got demagogues, doddering elder statesmen, unpopular wars, economic polarization, the odd assassination attempt, the increasing substitution of bread and circus for substantive political discourse. But are most guys really fixated on the way our decline mirrors that of our forefathers? Or are they daydreaming about military conquest and gladiator death matches because ancient Rome is, in the words of preeminent scholar Mary Beard, a “safe place for macho fantasies”? As historian Tom Holland put it in an essay for TIME: “The Roman Empire was the apex predator of antiquity: powerful, terrifying, box-office.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]So it isn’t too surprising that it’s this powerful, terrifying, box-office Rome that we encounter in Those About to Die, a new Peacock drama set during Emperor Vespasian’s reign in A.D. 79. Premiering July 18, the series spotlights the chariot racers and gladiators who kept the Roman masses entertained at Circus Maximus and later the Colosseum, many of them involuntarily and often at the cost of their lives. It’s a solid premise for a mega-budget sports drama (the 10-episode first season reportedly cost $150 million). But the execution is at once ghoulishly violent, cartoonishly soapy, and too formulaic to transcend the macho fantasies of its makers.
A project this expensive must have bankable names associated with it, and in that respect, Those About to Die delivers. The series marks the television debut of Roland Emmerich, the blockbuster maker behind Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, who directed the season’s first three and final two episodes. Creator Robert Rodat earned an Academy Award nomination as the screenwriter of Saving Private Ryan. And Anthony Hopkins plays the aging eminence Vespasian—a role that turns out to be quite a bit smaller than the trailer suggests.
The show’s true protagonist is the chariot races’ ambitious sports-betting magnate, Tenax, capably portrayed by Iwan Rheon, the Welsh actor who gave such a chilling performance as Game of Thrones’ psychopathic Ramsay Bolton. Having risen from humble means, with the requisite cache of damning secrets in his past, Tenax is no longer satisfied with his successful gambling operation. Now, he wants to create a fifth faction of charioteers to disrupt the existing four, all controlled by powerful patrician shareholders. His secret weapon is Scorpus (Dimitri Leonidas), a volatile champion racer who refers to himself in the third person, spends his free time wine-drunk at brothels, and whose sudden defection from the blue faction incites bitter conflict.
Tenax also needs an ally in the political realm—and he scores a mighty one in Domitian (Jojo Macari, pouting in every closeup), the younger of Vespasian’s two sons. If Tenax is the antihero of Those About Die—a poor man’s Don Draper or Tony Soprano, who does terrible things well but has redeeming qualities and his own peculiar moral code—then Domitian is its openly sadistic villain. A skillful rhetorician who represents his father’s interests in the Senate, he’s livid that Vespasian favors his older brother Titus (Tom Hughes), a military leader in an unpopular romance with the Queen of Judaea (Lara Wolf’s Berenice), as his successor. Viewers don’t really get a chance to wonder how far Domitian would go to win, because he’s killing and maiming and conspiring, not to mention mistreating his male lovers, from the beginning.
Elsewhere in the Empire, we meet three North African siblings who are dragged to Rome and sold as slaves after one, Aura (Kyshan Wilson), kills a soldier who tries to rape her younger sister, Jula (Alicia Edogamhe). Their brother Kwame (Moe Hashim), a gifted lion tracker, comes to their aid but ends up in the capital, too, as a gladiator. Their fiercely loyal mother, Cala (Sara Martins), follows, determined to free her children. With trustworthy help hard to find, the family becomes integral to Tenax’s story (and the canny Cala becomes his will-they-or-won’t-they love interest). So does another sibling trio, the Corsi brothers, who journey to Rome from Spain with some game-changing horses to sell.
It’s a lot of characters, and I haven’t even gotten into Kwame’s fellow gladiators or the smug patricians who are Tenax and Domitian’s common enemy. Rodat’s decision to introduce them all in the premiere, rather than incorporate new faces as the story unfolds, makes for a confusing start. And excessively long chariot-racing scenes limit opportunities, even within episodes that feel interminable at nearly an hour apiece, to advance the plot and develop characters.
The unwieldy cast is just one element that Those About to Die borrows from Game of Thrones, which has become the template for TV’s adult-oriented genre dramas. The set pieces are grand in scale but hollow, compared to Thrones’ best battle scenes, in impact. Whether the darkly lit cinematography is a gritty aesthetic choice or an easy way of masking visual flaws is anyone’s guess. Characters get killed off with abandon, and the body count ratchets up as the season progresses, though it’s hard to imagine these deaths moving anyone to tears. Emmerich’s camera lingers on wanton violence and sweaty sex; a drinking game that required players to do a shot every time someone got murdered stark naked during a sexual encounter could be lethal.
The show’s gaze is decisively male. Of the 14 executive producers attached to the project, including Emmerich and Rodat, who made their names with action spectacles and war stories, 13 are men. Emmerich splits directing duties with Marco Kreuzpaintner; their cinematographers are, respectively, Vittorio Omodel Zorini and Daniel Gottschalk. Those About to Die is loosely based on Daniel P. Mannix’s 1958 nonfiction book of the same name. (Two of the season’s five writers are women, so let’s be grateful for small victories.) Its machismo not only colors combat scenes and bedroom conquests, but also restricts the roles of its few prominent female characters. Tenax’s counterpart Cala aside, they’re silent prostitutes, scheming lovers, slaves.
Not that there are any especially memorable characters of any gender. There’s little consensus on what makes a soap opera, but one common element, from Dynasty to Yellowstone, is a cast of flat caricatures engaged in an endless war of ambitions. There are only a few types of people, among the two dozen or so we meet, in this show. The youth are uniformly idealistic. Everyone else is primarily defined by ruthlessness, though their motivations vary. Cala would betray anyone to bring her children safely home; then there’s Domitian, who needs to have his sandal on someone’s neck just to feel alive. The question that is supposed to consume us throughout the season, I guess, is whether Tenax is, at his core, more like the former or the latter.
But what really propels the show from episode to episode, more than any performance or personality, is a tidal wave of gore. While Thrones and House of the Dragon periodically puncture viewers’ delight in violence with thoughtful depictions of grief, guilt, and the futility of war, Those About to Die—bereft as it is of actual ideas—never lets human misery wreck the fun of watching horses trample racers, crocodiles bite people’s heads off, and trembling children get their throats slit. Emmerich and Rodat make it easy to shake our heads at the crowds cheering on this carnage in the arena without feeling implicated in the same bloodthirsty voyeurism. It’s those drunk Romans who are the problem, not us, whose lives in the present surely contain no echoes of that past! Gratuitous sex can be a benign pleasure; violence of this particular variety, by contrast, feels desensitizing, designed to make us stare at it in a hungry, dead-eyed stupor.
Those About to Die was in the works long before men’s ambient awareness of ancient Rome started trending (as was the forthcoming Gladiator sequel), and it’s a safe bet that Hollywood has been scrambling extra hard in the past several months to further satisfy their obsession. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s a smart and timely historical drama to be made about Rome’s long decline, even one that might unfold during this tumultuous period, a decade after the cataclysmic Year of the Four Emperors. But Those About to Die certainly isn’t it.
