10+ / 10
Official trailer
I’d put Rome against anything else in historical television, and the 10+ is earned. The production is so dense that a single viewing can’t take it all in. HBO ran it for two seasons, from 2005 to 2007, and canceled it because the budget was unsustainable. The twenty-two episodes it left are historical drama at a level no prestige series before or since has quite matched.
The series should have run six seasons. The two it got are the best historical television of the past twenty-five years, and it isn’t a close race.
What I love about Rome is how dirty and loud and alive it is.
Every other sword-and-sandal production I can think of feels like a museum next to it. These people haggle, gossip, pray, sweat and stab each other in streets you can practically smell, and I believe every minute of it. My only real grievance with the show is that there isn’t more of it, and that grievance belongs to HBO’s accountants.
Bruno Heller served as showrunner. Heller would later create The Mentalist. He had been a journalist and screenwriter before HBO assigned him the Rome project. The show was a co-production between HBO and the BBC. The combined budget was approximately ten million dollars per episode in 2005 dollars. That made Rome one of the most expensive television productions in history at the time of release. Every dollar of it shows up on screen, and I can’t name another TV production that spent its money this well. Every frame of the show contains the kind of production density that television budgets typically can’t support.
The Premise
The first season follows the final years of the Roman Republic from approximately 52 BC to 44 BC. Julius Caesar returns from Gaul with his legions. The Senate refuses his demands. Caesar crosses the Rubicon. The civil war between Caesar and Pompey begins. Caesar defeats Pompey. Caesar becomes dictator. Caesar is assassinated on the Ides of March. The season ends with Caesar dead and the Republic in collapse.
The second season follows the immediate aftermath. Mark Antony attempts to position himself as Caesar’s heir. Octavian arrives in Rome and asserts his own claim. The triumvirate forms. The proscriptions begin. Brutus and Cassius are defeated at Philippi. The triumvirate fractures. Antony and Octavian conduct the final civil war. Cleopatra dies. Octavian becomes Augustus. The Republic ends. The Empire begins.
The show handles all of this through the parallel narratives of two ordinary soldiers, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, whose fictional lives intersect with the major historical events.
Vorenus and Pullo are both based on real Roman centurions mentioned briefly in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. The historical record contains approximately two sentences about each. The show invents the rest. The invention works because the invented material is consistent with the actual social and military realities of the period.
The Cast
Kevin McKidd plays Vorenus. The performance is the foundation of the show. Vorenus is a serious career soldier who follows the rules, honors the gods, and tries to maintain dignity through circumstances that systematically destroy his ability to maintain it. McKidd plays the character as a man being slowly broken by the collapse of the institutions he’s spent his life serving. The performance is one of the great prestige television lead performances of the previous two decades. McKidd has done other excellent work since Rome. Nothing has matched what he delivered as Vorenus.
Ray Stevenson plays Pullo, and Pullo is the character I’d follow anywhere. He’s Vorenus’s opposite: loud, undisciplined, generous, violent, sentimental, and happy in ways Vorenus isn’t. Stevenson plays him with full physical commitment.
Pullo eats with his mouth open. He fights with whatever object is closest. He loves people and animals with an unselfconscious openness that Vorenus could never manage. I think it’s the most charismatic supporting turn prestige television has produced. Stevenson died in 2023 at fifty-eight years old, and the role remains his defining work.
Ciaran Hinds plays Julius Caesar. The performance is restrained, intelligent, and aware of the historical weight the character carries. Hinds doesn’t play Caesar as monumental statue. He plays Caesar as a politician executing strategy that he’s making up as he goes along because the situation is rare. The character calculates. The character improvises. The character occasionally panics. The performance honors the historical figure without deifying him. His Caesar is a working politician. He’s far scarier than the marble version every other production hands us.
James Purefoy plays Mark Antony. The performance is the second-best supporting performance in the show. Antony in Purefoy’s interpretation is brave, charming, sexually voracious, politically reckless, and capable of strategic brilliance when his attention is engaged. The character is dangerous because the character is unpredictable. The performance is the most physically committed of any in the show. Purefoy fully embodies a Roman general from a culture that valued physical presence as political asset.
Polly Walker plays Atia of the Julii, Caesar’s niece and Octavian’s mother. The performance ranks among the most influential female performances in prestige television of the past twenty years. Atia is ambitious, vindictive, sexually manipulative, occasionally tender, and entirely focused on advancing her family’s political position. Walker plays the contradictions without flattening them. Neither feminist icon nor villain, the character is a Roman aristocratic woman doing what Roman aristocratic women had to do to survive the political situation around them.
The performance influenced later prestige television female characters considerably.
Lindsay Duncan plays Servilia. Servilia is Caesar’s longtime mistress and Brutus’s mother. Duncan plays the character as the slighted woman whose accumulated humiliations eventually produce political action that destroys Caesar. The performance is quieter than Walker’s. The threat is therefore harder to anticipate. Duncan plays Servilia as a woman who watches and waits and eventually acts. The character’s arc across the first season is one of the strongest in the show.
Kenneth Cranham plays Pompey the Great. Tobias Menzies plays Brutus. Karl Johnson plays Cato. James Frain plays Octavian initially in the first season before Simon Woods takes over the older Octavian in the second season. The cast depth is consistent across all roles. Even the briefest supporting performances are calibrated for credibility within the Roman cultural context.
For Writers
Rome shows the value of parallel narrative structure when the historical events are too large for any single point-of-view character to witness directly. Vorenus and Pullo experience the major events through their service to greater historical figures. The audience receives the political collapse of the Republic through ordinary soldiers who don’t know what they’re witnessing as it happens. The two-tier structure preserves both the historical accuracy of the major events and the human accessibility of the lower-status protagonists.
The lesson for writers is that historical fiction often requires invented characters at lower social positions than the actual historical figures. Real historical figures tend to be either too documented or too rarefied to function as protagonists. Invented characters provide the access points the historical material needs. The invented characters can do things the real historical figures never did while still operating within the actual historical circumstances. Vorenus and Pullo are invented. The world they inhabit isn’t. The combination gives Rome its dramatic power.
The Production Design
Production ran primarily at Cinecittà Studios in Rome on permanent sets that approximated the Forum, the major Roman streets, and several aristocratic residences.
The sets were the largest standing exterior sets in television production at the time. The Forum set ran multiple city blocks. The street sets supported full crowd choreography with hundreds of extras. The aristocratic interior sets included accurate frescoes, accurate furniture, and accurate household equipment that conformed to actual archaeological evidence.
The costume design by April Ferry won the Costume Designers Guild Award and was nominated for the Emmy multiple times.
Ferry researched actual Roman textile production, actual dyeing methods, and actual class-specific clothing rules. Ferry calibrated the togas, the tunics, the military equipment, and the aristocratic finery for historical accuracy instead of for cinematic spectacle. The result is about as accurate a Roman wardrobe as any screen production has assembled.
The visual approach also restored the actual color palette of Roman urban life.
Most previous Roman productions had presented Rome as the gleaming white marble city that nineteenth-century neoclassical aesthetics had projected onto the historical record. Actual Roman buildings were painted in bright colors. Actual Roman public spaces contained competing graffiti, painted statues, and visible commercial signage. Rome the series presented this actual visual reality. The Forum isn’t white marble but brightly painted stone covered in graffiti and political slogans.
Historically, the visual choice is correct and produces a Rome considerably different from the Rome popular culture had previously presented.
The painted Forum is the choice I’d point to first if someone asked me why Rome looks better than every Roman epic before it. Those white-marble Romes always struck me as dead cities. This one’s covered in slogans and dirty jokes and shop signs, and it finally looks like a place where a million people lived and argued.
The Religion
Rome takes Roman religion seriously. The characters pray, make offerings, consult priests, and believe in the household gods and the state cult. The show doesn’t present Roman religion as colorful background. It presents Roman religion as the actual operating belief system that Romans lived within. The decision is one of the show’s distinctive strengths.
The Vorenus household includes specific household gods that the family addresses by name.
The aristocratic households include specific shrines that the audience sees in operation. The political moments include specific religious ceremonies that the characters perform with full credibility. The combination produces a Rome where religion is structural instead of decorative. The audience understands what the characters believe and how those beliefs shape their decisions.
When the second season moves to Alexandria, the show also handles the introduction of Egyptian religious material with similar seriousness. Cleopatra’s court works inside Egyptian religious structures that the show treats as functional instead of as exotic spectacle. The audience receives Egyptian religion as a different actual belief system instead of as a costume the Romans encounter.
The Sex
Rome features heavy sexual content. The show was made for HBO during the period when HBO was actively distinguishing itself from broadcast television through content that broadcast standards couldn’t have permitted. The sex in Rome isn’t gratuitous in the strict sense but historically grounded. Roman aristocratic culture worked within the sexual structures the show depicts. The show calibrates Atia and Antony’s relationship for actual aristocratic Roman sexual customs. Servilia and Caesar’s relationship reflects actual long-term aristocratic affairs that the historical record documents.
Its handling of class-specific sexual dynamics shows the same fidelity. The aristocratic characters work within different sexual rules than the soldier characters or the slave characters. The differences reflect actual class differences. The show doesn’t impose modern sexual ethics onto Roman characters or exoticize the differences. The sexual content is treated as part of the wider cultural reality the show is reconstructing.
Audiences sensitive to sexual content should be aware that Rome is at full HBO content levels. The show is right for adult audiences and isn’t right for younger viewers. The sexual material is one of the show’s defining features instead of a removable element. Audiences who can’t accept it can’t accept the show. I’ll take this frankness over one more toga epic where the Romans behave like a church choir.
The Violence
Rome features real violence. The combat sequences are physically grounded. The battle choreography reflects actual Roman military doctrine. The political violence reflects actual Roman political practice. The slave punishments reflect actual Roman slave law. The show doesn’t flinch from the brutality the period contained.
The opening battle sequence of the series shows the approach. Vorenus and Pullo are engaged in actual combat as Roman legionaries. The combat is close-quarter, exhausting, and primarily mechanical. The soldiers are units instead of as individual heroes. The choreography reflects actual Roman tactics including the formal rotation of front-rank soldiers and the disciplined use of pila and gladii. The sequence is one of the more accurate depictions of Roman military combat in screen history.
Political violence gets similar fidelity. It reconstructs the Ides of March assassination from the surviving classical sources. The proscriptions in the second season include the actual deaths of historical figures including Cicero. It dramatizes the Battle of Philippi and the Battle of Actium within the constraints of television budget. The result is a show that respects the historical violence of the period without either gratuitous excess or sanitizing restraint.
For Writers
Rome shows the value of treating historical cultural material on its own terms instead of translating it into modern moral structures. The show doesn’t condemn or celebrate Roman slavery. It simply shows what Roman slavery was and lets the audience absorb the implications. The show doesn’t condemn Roman patriarchy. It shows how the patriarchy functioned and lets the audience see both the costs and the rare advantages it produced for women operating within it.
The show doesn’t condemn Roman religion. The show shows the characters operating within their religious structure and lets the audience evaluate the structure on its own terms. The lesson for writers is that historical fiction requires holding modern moral instincts in restraint while the story establishes the period material. Once the story has established the period reality, the audience can develop its own response to the material.
Writers who impose modern moral commentary onto historical periods produce thinner work than writers who trust the audience to engage with the period on its actual terms.
The Compression Problem
Unsustainable production costs ended the series after two seasons. HBO and the BBC had originally planned five seasons. The Caesar material was supposed to extend across two seasons. The Antony and Cleopatra material was supposed to occupy seasons three and four. The final season was supposed to handle the early Augustan period. The cancellation forced massive compression of the planned material.
The second season is the visible victim of the compression.
The season covers approximately fifteen years of historical material in ten episodes. Major historical events get one or two scenes each. Characters disappear without dramatic resolution. The season compresses the Antony and Cleopatra material that was supposed to occupy two seasons into approximately three episodes. The Battle of Actium happens in dialogue instead of on screen. The pacing of the second season feels rushed because it was rushed.
Actium happening offscreen in a line of dialogue is still a cheat. The show spent a fortune making the Forum look lived in and then couldn’t afford the most important sea battle of the era. Characters vanish, years pass between scenes, and I can feel the writers sprinting for the finish line before the money ran out.
The compression doesn’t ruin the second season. The material that does appear is excellent within its compressed structure.
The Antony and Cleopatra sequences in particular contain some of the strongest single scenes in the show. The Atia and Octavia material remains powerful. The Vorenus and Pullo individual story arcs reach satisfying conclusions despite the rushed broader political events. The season works as the actual season that was made instead of as the season that should have been made.
The audience that experienced the cancellation in 2007 understandably wanted more.
The audience that comes to the show now can experience the two seasons as a complete artistic unit instead of as a truncated longer work. The framing affects how the show tones. Approaching Rome as twenty-two episodes of historical drama produces different response than approaching it as the first forty percent of an unfinished five-season epic. Both framings are legitimate. Both produce different appreciation of the same material.
The Music
Jeff Beal composed the score. Beal had been working primarily in film and would later score House of Cards. His Rome score uses a combination of orchestral and ancient instrument approaches. The recurring themes deploy harp, flute, drums, and string material that approximates the kinds of musical instruments actual Roman audiences might have heard. The combination produces music that sounds period-suitable without becoming archaeologically precious.
HBO has rarely made a more distinctive opening title sequence. The graphics depict animated Roman wall frescoes that come alive across the title card. The music for the sequence has become a widely recognized prestige television opening theme of the previous twenty years. The opening establishes the show’s visual and tonal identity within ninety seconds.
That title sequence is ninety seconds I’d never fast-forward. The frescoes and graffiti crawling to life over Beal’s theme tell you exactly what kind of show you’re in for, and the theme is one that sticks.
The Influence
Rome influenced almost every later historical prestige television series.
Game of Thrones inherited Rome’s willingness to treat sexual and violent material with adult frankness within a textured historical or pseudo-historical context. The Borgias, The Tudors, Spartacus, and other historical productions all work within structures that Rome had established. Bruno Heller’s specific approach to using ordinary protagonists as access points to major historical events has become standard practice for the genre.
That visual approach also influenced later production design across multiple historical periods.
The willingness to restore actual color palettes instead of projecting nineteenth-century neoclassical aesthetics onto historical material has become standard. The commitment to physical sets and practical effects over digital recreation has become aspirational instead of universal but remains an acknowledged ideal. Most historical productions since 2007 have measured themselves against what Rome accomplished even when they haven’t matched it.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Rome is the example case for what television can accomplish when production budget supports complete creative ambition. The HBO and BBC co-production spent approximately ten million dollars per episode in 2005 dollars. The expense is visible. Every frame contains the kind of production density that television budgets typically can’t support. The expense produced the most accurate Roman period reconstruction in screen history. It also produced the unsustainability that led to cancellation.
This show is the example of both what television can accomplish when fully funded and what economic pressures destroy when the funding becomes too expensive to maintain.
The lesson for writers is that ambition has costs. Ambitious work requires resources that may not be renewable. Less ambitious work can sustain longer because the ongoing demands are lower. Rome chose maximum ambition and got two seasons. Other shows have chosen less ambition and gotten ten seasons. Both choices are legitimate.
The writer should understand the tradeoff and make the choice with full awareness of the consequences. Rome couldn’t have been Rome at a sustainable budget. The unsustainable budget is the show. The cancellation is the price the show paid for being what it was.
Is Rome (HBO, 2005-2007) worth watching?
A 10+. Rome is among the best television productions ever made and remains the high-water mark for historical prestige television. The two seasons that exist comprise twenty-two episodes of work that no later historical production has matched. Bruno Heller’s showrunning, Kevin McKidd and Ray Stevenson’s parallel performances, the entire supporting cast, the production design, the costume design, the religious and sexual fidelity, the violence calibration, and the willingness to treat Roman culture on its own terms combine to produce a series that matches the level the historical material deserves.
Rome should have run six seasons and got two, and those two still beat almost any historical television of the past quarter century. The first season is stronger because the production had time to breathe, and the second is still excellent despite the rushing. McKidd and Stevenson alone would justify a 10 from me. The plus is for the painted Forum, the gods on the household shrine, and the nerve to let Romans behave like Romans. Watch it, then watch it again, because one pass can’t catch everything in the frame.
