Tearing Off the Togas

By James Poniewozik

The secret to some of the best HBO series is dirt. Not filthy language, not nudity--actual dirt. The muck in the streets of Deadwood, Tony Soprano's soldiers exhuming an incriminating body, the Fisher family tossing shovelfuls in the grave as Six Feet Under buried its lead character Nate--all this soil embodies the network's insistence on deprettifying its subjects.

So when HBO set out to make a drama about Rome in the time of Julius Caesar, Job One was to dirty up the Eternal City. Rome (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T., debuts Aug. 28) eschews the popular white-marble myth. "Part of the brief was to create an image of Rome nobody has seen before," says executive producer Frank Doelger. Historic Rome, he says, was a teeming capital full of color, pornographic graffiti and coed public latrines. It was crowded, relentlessly commercial (a town crier's announcement in one episode ends with an ad for a flour miller) and, above all, filthy. Instructing the set designers, says Doelger, "I told them to think about India--Bombay or Calcutta." It's as if you don't just see this Rome, you smell it.

That squalor did not come cheap. The set alone, at Rome's Cinecitt`a studio lot, cost $13 million and the 12-episode first season, $100 million. Shooting began in March 2004 but was delayed as HBO shuffled producers and reshot chunks of the first three episodes (directed by filmmaker Michael Apted). It also had the largely British cast drop the regional accents they had used to distinguish the classes, deeming them too inscrutable for Americans.

The completed Rome is still a class-conscious story, splitting focus between historical figures and hoi polloi. Its overarching story is the power struggle between Caesar (Ciaran Hinds), who has just defeated the Gauls, and his onetime friend Pompey Magnus (Kenneth Cranham). Season 1 traces Caesar's rise to power and the events leading to his assassination. (None of this should be a spoiler, unless the educational system has truly failed us.)

We follow the events through the eyes of Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two lower-class soldiers in Caesar's 13th Legion. This plebeian odd couple--Pullo's a rogue, Vorenus a by-the-book prig--offer grounding and some nicely turned comic relief, as when Pullo, jailed for disobeying an order, petitions Forculus, a Roman god of doors. "I will kill for you a fine white lamb," he promises. "Or failing that--if I couldn't get a good one at a decent price--then six pigeons." But the scripts resort to contrivance and coincidence to keep the pair at the center of events. In Episode 2, a confrontation that precipitates Caesar's coming to power turns out to have been caused by a bar brawl Pullo got into. It's all a bit too Forrestus Gumpus.

What we want most from Roman drama is good old pagan decadence, and Rome hears our prayers. There are bloody rituals, lewd pantomimes and a show-stealing turn by Polly Walker as Atia, Caesar's scheming niece; with her flaming red hair and willingness to trade sex for power, she's like a Latin version of The O.C.'s villain Julie Cooper. The series humanizes figures we know as marble busts: Caesar is a calculating pol, Mark Antony (James Purefoy) a narcissistic ass and Octavian (Max Pirkis)--Atia's son and the future Caesar Augustus--a precocious boy with a gift for Machiavellian strategy. The aim is to take those historical giants off their pedestals. "Nothing changes that much," Stevenson tells TIME. "Politicians will always be politicians."

The main failing of Rome, a BBC co-production, is that it is more like an expensive I, Claudius than a work of HBO iconoclasm. The visuals are staggering--you see every penny spent--but cosmetic changes aside, it does not rethink its genre as, say, Deadwood did the western. At heart, it is largely a history-book story with familiar themes, enacted by regal men with British accents. One has to wonder what HBO would have had if it had let Deadwood creator David Milch do the more unusual series he once proposed: a drama about ancient Roman city cops.

There are worse things than being unsurprisingly good, though, and after a slow start, Rome's lusty intrigue draws you in to this gorgeously corrupt, dirty city. Just mind where you step. --With reporting by Mimi Murphy/Rome

With reporting by Mimi Murphy/Rome