Word: caesares
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...when HBO set out to make a drama about Rome in the time of Julius Caesar, Job One was to dirty up the Eternal City. Rome (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T., debuts Aug. 28) eschews the popular white-marble myth. "Part of the brief was to create an image of Rome nobody has seen before," says executive producer Frank Doelger. Historic Rome, he says, was a teeming capital full of color, pornographic graffiti and coed public latrines. It was crowded, relentlessly commercial (a town crier's announcement in one episode ends with an ad for a flour miller) and, above...
...completed Rome is still a class-conscious story, splitting focus between historical figures and hoi polloi. Its overarching story is the power struggle between Caesar (Ciarán Hinds), who has just defeated the Gauls, and his onetime friend Pompey Magnus (Kenneth Cranham). Season 1 traces Caesar's rise to power and the events leading to his assassination. (None of this should be a spoiler, unless the educational system has truly failed...
...follow the events through the eyes of Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two lower-class soldiers in Caesar's 13th Legion. This plebeian odd couple--Pullo's a rogue, Vorenus a by-the-book prig--offer grounding and some nicely turned comic relief, as when Pullo, jailed for disobeying an order, petitions Forculus, a Roman god of doors. "I will kill for you a fine white lamb," he promises. "Or failing that--if I couldn't get a good one at a decent price--then six pigeons." But the scripts resort to contrivance and coincidence...
What we want most from Roman drama is good old pagan decadence, and Rome hears our prayers. There are bloody rituals, lewd pantomimes and a show-stealing turn by Polly Walker as Atia, Caesar's scheming niece; with her flaming red hair and willingness to trade sex for power, she's like a Latin version of The O.C.'s villain Julie Cooper. The series humanizes figures we know as marble busts: Caesar is a calculating pol, Mark Antony (James Purefoy) a narcissistic ass and Octavian (Max Pirkis)--Atia's son and the future Caesar Augustus--a precocious boy with...
DIED. DANNY SIMON, 86, veteran comedy writer for Phil Silvers, Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, and the inspiration for some of the famous characters written by his younger brother Neil; in Portland, Ore. Revered by younger comics--Woody Allen said he learned all he knew about comedy writing from him--Danny had an idea for a play, from his experience as a divorced man living with another, that became Neil's The Odd Couple...