Word: rome
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
That squalor did not come cheap. The set alone, at Rome's Cinecittà studio lot, cost $13 million and the 12-episode first season, $100 million. Shooting began in March 2004 but was delayed as HBO shuffled producers and reshot chunks of the first three episodes (directed by filmmaker Michael Apted). It also had the largely British cast drop the regional accents they had used to distinguish the classes, deeming them too inscrutable for Americans...
...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...
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...
...excellent relationship with the powerful bishop of Mexico City and is a natural conversation partner for legislators toiling over immigration riddles. A long affiliation with the conservative teaching group Opus Dei guarantees him the Vatican's doctrinal confidence and a support and information network leading high up in Rome. Yet despite his orthodoxy, Gomez is a natural conciliator admired for uniting rich and poor and Anglo and Hispanic Catholics behind Denver's Centro Juan Diego, a hybrid Latino religious-instruction and social-services center hailed as a national model...