‘Those About to Die’ Is a Sinister Sports Soap for Rome Stans

TThe Roman Empire haunts men’s minds, as women on TikTok recently discovered and reported to the world. This concern doesn’t seem so silly when we think about the American Empire in 2024; we have demagogues, wavering elder statesmen, unpopular wars, economic polarization, occasional assassination attempts, the increasing replacement of substantive political discourse by bread and circuses. But are most men really fixated on the way our decline mirrors that of our ancestors? Or are they daydreaming about military conquests and deadly gladiatorial combats because Ancient Rome is, in the words of prominent scholar Mary Beard, a “safe place for sexist fantasies”? As historian Tom Holland said in an essay for TIME: “The Roman Empire was the apex predator of antiquity: powerful, terrifying, box office.”

So it’s no surprise that it’s this powerful and frightening box-office Rome that we find in Those about to die, a new Peacock drama set during the reign of Emperor Vespasian in 79 AD. Premiering on July 18, the series highlights the chariot riders and gladiators who kept the Roman masses entertained in the Circus Maximus and later the Colosseum, many of them unwittingly and often at the cost of their lives. It’s a solid premise for a mega-budget sports drama (the 10-episode first season reportedly cost $150 million). But the execution is at once terrifyingly violent, cartoonishly soapy and too stereotypical to transcend the sexist fantasies of its creators.

Such an expensive project must have bankable names associated with it, and in that respect, Those about to die delivery. The series marks the television debut of Roland Emmerich, the hit creator behind Independence Day It is The day after tomorrow, who directed the first three and last two episodes of the season. Creator Robert Rodat was nominated for an Oscar as a screenwriter for Saving Private Ryan. And Anthony Hopkins plays the aging eminence Vespasian – a role that turns out to be a little smaller than the trailer suggests.

The show’s true protagonist is ambitious chariot racing sports betting tycoon Tenax, expertly played by Iwan Rheon, the Welsh actor who gave such a chilling performance as The Game of Thrones‘ psychopath Ramsay Bolton. Having risen from humble means, with the requisite cache of hard-hitting secrets in his past, Tenax is no longer satisfied with his successful gambling operation. Now, he wants to create a fifth faction of coachmen to disrupt the existing four, all controlled by powerful patrician shareholders. His secret weapon is Scorpus (Dimitri Leonidas), a volatile racing champion who refers to himself in the third person, spends his free time drunk on wine in brothels, and whose sudden defection from the blue faction incites bitter conflict.

Tenax also needs an ally in the political sphere – and he gets a powerful one in Domitian (Jojo Macari, pouting in every close-up), the younger of Vespasian’s two sons. If Tenax is the antihero of Those who are about to die– Don Draper or Tony Soprano of a poor man, who does terrible things well, but has redeeming qualities and his own peculiar moral code – then Domitian is his openly sadistic villain. A skilled rhetorician who represents his father’s interests in the Senate, he is furious that Vespasian favors his older brother, Titus (Tom Hughes), a military leader in an unpopular romance with the Queen of Judea (Lara Wolf’s Bernice), as his successor. Viewers don’t really get the chance to wonder how far Domitian would go to win, because he’s been killing, maiming, and conspiring, not to mention mistreating his male lovers, from the start.

Elsewhere in the Empire, we meet three North African brothers who are dragged to Rome and sold into slavery after one of them, Aura (Kyshan Wilson), kills a soldier who tries to rape their younger sister, Jula (Alicia Edogamhe). Their brother, Kwame (Moe Hashim), a talented lion tracker, comes to their aid, but also ends up in the capital, as a gladiator. Her fiercely loyal mother, Cala (Sara Martins), follows her, determined to free her children. With trustworthy help hard to find, the family becomes an integral part of Tenax’s story (and the cunning Cala becomes her love interest, will they or won’t they). The same happens with another trio of brothers, the Corsi brothers, who travel from Spain to Rome with some revolutionary horses to sell.

There are a lot of characters, and I haven’t even gotten into Kwame’s fellow gladiators or the smug patricians who are common enemies of Tenax and Domitian. Rodat’s decision to introduce them all in the premiere, rather than incorporating new faces as the story unfolds, makes for a confusing start. And overly long chariot racing scenes limit the opportunities, even in what seem like interminable episodes at nearly an hour each, to advance the plot and develop characters.

The heavy cast is just one element that Those about to die borrow from The Game of Thrones, which became the template for adult-oriented genre dramas on TV. The set pieces are grand in scale but empty compared to Thrones‘best battle scenes, in impact. Whether darkly lit cinematography is a bold aesthetic choice or a easy way to mask visual flaws nobody knows. Characters are killed off recklessly and the body count rises as the season progresses, though it’s hard to imagine these deaths bringing anyone to tears. Emmerich’s camera focuses on the wanton violence and sweaty sex; a drinking game that required players to take a shot every time someone was murdered naked during a sexual encounter could have been lethal.

The look of the show is decidedly masculine. Of the 14 executive producers linked to the project, including Emmerich and Rodat, who stood out with action shows and war stories, 13 are men. Emmerich shares directing duties with Marco Kreuzpaintner; its directors of photography are, respectively, Vittorio Omodel Zorini and Daniel Gottschalk. Those about to die is loosely based on Daniel P. Mannix’s 1958 nonfiction book of the same name. (Two of the season’s five writers are women, so let’s be grateful for the small victories.) Its machismo not only colors the combat scenes and bedroom conquests, but it also restricts the roles of its few prominent female characters. Leaving aside Tenax’s counterpart Cala, they are silent prostitutes, scheming lovers, slaves.

Not that there are any especially memorable characters of any genre. There is little consensus on what constitutes a soap opera, but there is a common element, from Dynasty for Yellow stone, is a cast of flat caricatures engaged in an endless war of ambition. There are only a few types of people out of the two dozen or so we meet on this show. Young people are uniformly idealistic. Everyone else is defined primarily by cruelty, though their motivations vary. Cala would betray anyone to bring her children home safely; Then there’s Domitiano, who needs to put his sandal around someone’s neck just to feel alive. The question that should consume us throughout the season, I think, is whether Tenax is, at its core, more like the former or the latter.

But what really drives the series from episode to episode, more than any performance or personality, is a rush of blood. While Thrones It is Dragon House periodically pierce viewers’ pleasure in violence with thoughtful depictions of the pain, guilt, and futility of war, Those about to die— devoid of real ideas — never lets human misery destroy the fun of watching horses trample hallways, crocodiles bite people’s heads off, and trembling children have their throats slit. Emmerich and Rodat make it easy to shake their heads in front of the crowd cheering for this carnage in the arena, without feeling implicated in the same bloodthirsty voyeurism. The problem is those drunken Romans, not us, whose lives in the present certainly contain no echoes of that past! Gratuitous sex can be a benign pleasure; Violence of this particular kind, on the other hand, feels desensitizing, designed to make us look at it in a starving, dead stupor.

Those about to die was underway long before men’s environmental awareness of Ancient Rome began to trend (as did future Gladiator sequel), and it’s a safe bet that Hollywood has been trying even harder in recent months to further satisfy its obsession. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There is an intelligent and timely historical drama to be made about Rome’s long decline, even one that could unfold during this tumultuous period, a decade after the cataclysmic Year of the Four Emperors. But Those about to die It’s certainly not that.