Do you ever find yourself rewriting a TV show in your head as you watch it? Maybe it’s been on for a few seasons and is failing to be as captivating as it used to be, or you’ve seen so much TV that you can think of a better, more complex way that some character development should have happened. Any way you slice it, that sort of daydreaming is usually reserved for shows that have been around for a couple of seasons, not a series premiere starring Academy Award Winner Anthony Hopkins.
Those About to Die is based on the David P. Mannix book of the same name, which also inspired Ridley Scott’s Gladiator—and, by proxy, the upcoming Gladiator II. The series follows what feels like 45 different characters as they con, spy, gamble, and fight their way to their many ambitions in Flavian Rome. Woefully reminiscent of the former House of the Dragon title sequence, Those About to Die opens with gallons of CGI blood with what can only be described as the wrong viscosity flowing through a marble rendering of Rome. Keep Game of Thrones in your head, because the main-est character of the uber-bloated ensemble cast is Tenax, played by Ramsay Bolton himself, Iwan Rheon.
Truly, the show tries to be as Thrones-ian as possible and fails in all the important ways at every turn. Those About to Die attempts to weave a complex political tale with characters coming from all walks of life—and immediately trips over all of the threads used to make it. The 55 minute-long first episode throws about 20 characters in front of you to start the story, and there’s no chance that you will know all of their names by the end of the hour without the help of subtitles (which these screeners did not have). As previously mentioned, Tenax is the most central of this overfilled solar system, and it is through his scheming as the owner of the Circus Maximus that we see how Rome’s gambling underbelly has fingers in everyone’s business all the way up to the Imperial family. Without listing every storyline that the show forces you to sit through, the general sense is that every character wants either power, freedom, or the power that comes with freedom, and depending on the character, they might be willing to kill for it. The episode feels like it’s never going to end, and the pacing does not get much better as the season progresses.
Though it is generally good practice to try and include every character in a significant way in the opening episode of a series, that doesn’t apply when it means we manically jump from location to location to see them. While the majority of the series takes place in and near Rome, there are four characters—Cala (Sara Martins-Court) and her children, Aura (Kyshan Wilson), Jula (Alicia Ann Edogamhe), and Kwame (Moe Hashim)—who enter the fold from the north African reaches of the empire. These are the only Black characters in Those About to Die with their own individual character arcs, and because of the bulging nature of the first episode, it feels like they are on the back burner. It is well known that the Roman Empire took many people of many different ethnic and racial groups as slaves, but it is specifically these Black characters who we see suffer over and over again in their quests to be freed from an institution that they were not oppressed by when we first met them.
As with any show about Rome, violence is a spectacle and is therefore incredibly gratuitous. To give the show some credit, the blood and gore is the perfect amount of gruesome for a show of this caliber on a streaming service, and that makes it the one thing that cannot be complained about. The sexual violence is a different matter. Nothing will be as bad as what Game of Thrones did at its worst, but Those About to Die is still distasteful in its handling of assault about half the time it’s addressed. Certain male characters have past experiences of sexual trauma that are handled decently—likely due to them being children at the time, eliminating the possibility of filming a violent scene—but when it comes to the present day where female characters are being assaulted, there is not much tact. Multiple women are sexually harassed and assaulted without any recourse. There is a single instance where a woman being harassed materially moves the story forward, but every other assault never needed to go as far as they did for things to continue moving. That statement may come off as prudeish to some, but, at the end of the day, we still have a long way to go when it comes to media handling sexual violence properly and respectfully, and Those About to Die does nothing to make any progress on that front.
Finally, there is the issue of production value. The deeper into the 2020s we get, the more sure it is that poor on-set virtual production will be a hallmark of the decade. The technology made its television debut via The Mandalorian with the StageCraft system, but Volume Stages from other VFX companies have made their way into the industry, often to the detriment of whatever production they take part in. While there are plenty of instances of Volume Stage usage that look good to even the most avid nitpicker of media, Those About to Die is not one of those productions. It is almost immediately clear that the series utilized the technology, with the results presenting us with backgrounds that are uncannily stagnant and glazed over with a murky gray sheen. The budget for Those About to Die was reportedly $140 million, which averages out to about $14 million per episode. In contrast, Gladiator’s $103 million budget comes out to about $191 million when adjusted for inflation, and despite being shot during the first 5 months of 1999, it still looks leagues better. It has been said before and should be said until something changes: money cannot buy you good television, and it cannot make a bad TV show better. Shiny new technology is not always as shiny as one may think it is, and Those About to Die is a textbook example of Hollywood’s new over-reliance on CGI to keep pushing out media to the masses.
The little good provided by Those About to Die does nothing to make it worth watching, but it will certainly make its way to the annals of TikTok in the form of contextless 90-second clips, so maybe it has a chance to gain a following that way. There is simply too much going on without enough depth to say that this is good, but hey, maybe it’s worth having on in the background at a bar or as white noise while you work. If you want ancient Rome’s spectacle of violence, rewatch Gladiator to get ready for the sequel, and if you want the political intrigue that Those About to Die wants to offer, House of the Dragon has three more episodes left to air this season. This show is worth 10 hours of your life that you will never get back, and I cannot, in good conscience, recommend venturing into this gorey, surface-level odyssey.
Those About to Die premieres Thursday, July 18th on Peacock.
Kathryn Porter is a freelance writer who will talk endlessly about anything entertainment given the chance. You can find her @kaechops on Twitter.
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