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Basic Facts:

Episodes: 12
Runtime: 60 min.
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Premiered: 2005

Format:

Series

Genres:

Action, Drama, History, War

Created By:

Bruno Heller, John Milius, William J. MacDonald

Actors:

Ciarán Hinds, David Bamber, Indira Varma, James Purefoy, Kenneth Cranham, Kerry Condon, Kevin McKidd, Lee Boardman, Lindsay Duncan, Max Pirkis, Nicholas Woodeson, Polly Walker, Ray Stevenson, Tobias Menzies

Made In:

Italy, UK, USA

Premiered at:

HBO

Rome is one of the best TV series ever made. That’s not me exag­ger­at­ing, that’s plain and sim­ple truth. Rome really has every­thing a good TV series need and that includes cast, story, music, great set designs and much more. Series has been in plan­ing and pro­duc­tion for more than 3 years before the first sea­son (out of two made) aired. Inter­est­ing is that series costed more than 110 mil­lions of dol­lars for the ini­tial 12 episodes.

Story

First sea­son of Rome is set in the time of Julius Ceasar civil war, his rise and fall cover period between 52 BC and 44 BC. Series chron­i­cles life of the Rome’s most pow­er­ful fam­i­lies but two main char­ac­ters are sol­diers in the Ceasars army Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, also both his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. It’s hard to expect that series story line fol­lows exact his­tor­i­cal events, but for the most part they are accu­rate. Some char­ac­ters got big­ger roles in the events, and the story is mod­i­fied to bet­ter serve the goal of show­ing the influ­ence of peo­ple on the his­toric events.

Vorenus and Pullo

Cast and characters

Cast is absolutely great, even that Ital­ians had a lot of objec­tions on the selec­tion of some actors espe­cially Cia­rán Hinds as Ceasar. I think that he did great job and he is one of my favorite char­ac­ters in the first sea­son. James Pure­foy is excel­lent as Mark Antony and the same goes for Kevin McK­idd (Vorenus) and Ray Steven­son (Pullo).

Pro­duc­tion

Ital­ian TV RAI was a co pro­ducer of the series and the whole series is filmed on sets in Italy on six sound stages. Recon­struc­tion of the ancient Rome is done to a small­est details and that gave the series very authen­tic and real­is­tic look. Music is also very impor­tant part, and Jeff Beals did a great job with it using many of the authen­tic instru­ments from the period.

Con­clu­sion

To repeat what I said at the begin­ning Rome is an amaz­ing series and a defin­i­tive one for the must watch list. Rome is avail­able on DVD and BluRay.