MediaGuardian.co.uk | Overnights | TV ratings: November 9
According to MediaGuardian.co.uk (registration required): "BBC2's Rome shed almost a third of its audience last night, with nearly 2 million viewers from last week's launch show failing to come back for the second episode."
I'm not surprised at this. You wanna know why? Because it's TRIPE.
Looks fantastic, make no mishtake. You can tell it was filmed in HD, which I'm sure Andrew could expound upon. But in using the latest technology and spending so much on production design, they forgot to make it any good.
Can you spell g-r-a-t-u-i-t-o-u-s? They put naked people in it. Correction: they put naked women in it, to satisfy the HBO people (presumably), but the nakedness is as prurient and pointless as the girls dancing on the bar in The Sopranos. Someone walks into a room: a woman is naked in the bath. She stands up, making sure we can see her breasts and her neatly trimmed bush. She turns around, making sure we can see her arse. Then she puts on a robe and walks out. Wa-hey!
But plot? Character? We're dealing with Caesar here, remember. But, unlike the Conn Igulden books (which fictionalise Caesar's life and his relationships with the likes of Brutus and Servilia), we get no real depth or background. And they keep having to interrupt things for some gratuitous violence, or more sex 'n' nudity, or just something uniquely horrible, like someone having their head trephined.
There's something juvenile and pointless in scenes like the one in episode one, in which a Roman soldier rapes a shepherdess. She's not a character. Nothing about the plot moves forward at this point, we learn nothing interesting about any of the characters. We just see a bit of brutal sex (no nudity to speak of), with a pretty girl taking it from behind, and we move on. Wa-hey!
Script? Rubbish. Characters? Shite. Plot? Interrupted by so many gratuitous scenes that you can't really follow it. And the worst thing about it is, we've seen it all before. Remember I, Claudius? Caligula? Obviously, nobody at the BBC does.
I watched 30 seconds of the second episode, but there was so much blood and gore (the trephining) that I switched over and watched Numb3rs instead.
I'm not surprised at this. You wanna know why? Because it's TRIPE.
Looks fantastic, make no mishtake. You can tell it was filmed in HD, which I'm sure Andrew could expound upon. But in using the latest technology and spending so much on production design, they forgot to make it any good.
Can you spell g-r-a-t-u-i-t-o-u-s? They put naked people in it. Correction: they put naked women in it, to satisfy the HBO people (presumably), but the nakedness is as prurient and pointless as the girls dancing on the bar in The Sopranos. Someone walks into a room: a woman is naked in the bath. She stands up, making sure we can see her breasts and her neatly trimmed bush. She turns around, making sure we can see her arse. Then she puts on a robe and walks out. Wa-hey!
But plot? Character? We're dealing with Caesar here, remember. But, unlike the Conn Igulden books (which fictionalise Caesar's life and his relationships with the likes of Brutus and Servilia), we get no real depth or background. And they keep having to interrupt things for some gratuitous violence, or more sex 'n' nudity, or just something uniquely horrible, like someone having their head trephined.
There's something juvenile and pointless in scenes like the one in episode one, in which a Roman soldier rapes a shepherdess. She's not a character. Nothing about the plot moves forward at this point, we learn nothing interesting about any of the characters. We just see a bit of brutal sex (no nudity to speak of), with a pretty girl taking it from behind, and we move on. Wa-hey!
Script? Rubbish. Characters? Shite. Plot? Interrupted by so many gratuitous scenes that you can't really follow it. And the worst thing about it is, we've seen it all before. Remember I, Claudius? Caligula? Obviously, nobody at the BBC does.
I watched 30 seconds of the second episode, but there was so much blood and gore (the trephining) that I switched over and watched Numb3rs instead.
posted by Anonymous at
Thursday, November 10, 2005
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