We’re living in an age where television is allowed to be bigger and grander than ever. In the wake of Game of Thrones, we’re seeing more sweeping, high-budget sagas take over streaming services. House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, and even the most recent season of Stranger Things prove that in the streaming era, sometimes more is more.
However, money isn’t the only thing needed to tell a compelling story. The other elements — good casting, a good script, and good direction — are less tangible and never a guarantee. Despite having all these elements on paper, Peacock’s new epic historical drama Those About to Die fails to rise to the height of its predecessors. While it does eventually reach a satisfying ending, the habits of imitation weigh it down from what it could have been.
Those About to Die is the brainchild of Roland Emmerich, the director behind Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow (and also Stonewall and Moonfall). Emmerich’s blockbuster chops show through the series’ sheer ambition: the pilot ends with an epic chariot race, and the cast is sprawling enough that you may need to take notes to keep track.
However revolutionary that may feel, from the very first scene it seems obvious that two major influences touch every aspect of this show: Game of Thrones and Peaky Blinders, the kind of “sophisticated” but still bro-y drama series that made a grim and grisly plot and tone work for them.
Some of these imitations are smart: Tenax, played by Game of Thrones’ Iwan Rheon, is the kind of Tommy Shelby-esque hero a show like this needs, a conniving upstart businessman who oversees a betting house and a Fagin-esque gaggle of small children. He runs speculation on the chariot games between the four established factions but has ambitions of starting his own and climbing the ranks of Roman society.
That society forms most of the rest of the cast. We see slaves, charioteers, patricians, politicians, and even the royal family. Emperor Vespasian, played by Academy Award winner Anthony Hopkins, is supposed to be the crown jewel of the series, but he’s barely in the episodes, and when he is, his line deliveries fall flat. Thankfully, his sons Titus (Tom Hughes) and Domitian (Jojo Mercari) fill the void with two classic archetypes: Titus is the noble soldier who falls for the wrong woman, and Domitian is the scheming politician, a Shakespearean villain who is easy to love to hate.
The highlight of the multilayered story is the Numidian family, who find themselves torn apart by the brutal slave trade. Cala (Sara Martins) watches in terror as her lion-hunting son Kwame (Moe Ashem) and daughters Aura (Kyshan Wilson) and Jula (Alicia Edogamhe) are toted off to Rome to be sold as slaves. Kwame manages to make a name for himself in the gladiatorial stadium, but to regain the freedom of the girls, Cala must beg borrow and steal, which leads her to make an uneasy alliance with Tenax himself.
All of these storylines build to a finale that does actually feel deserving of the high budget, but the series takes far too long to reach that point. The charioteering drama is full of tedious discussion over horses and harness design. And with the flashy but not seamless CGI, the chariot racing scenes bring to mind The Phantom Menace more than Ben-Hur.
Those About to Die is an eight-episode show stretched into 10, a show so desperately vying for the title “prestige” it forgets to keep the plot interesting from episode to episode. These are just symptoms of the TV landscape where bigger is better, but to bastardize a quote from another Rome-set epic: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our budgets, but in ourselves.
