Those About to Die is not a reality-television competition for hair colourists (that’s Those About to Dye, and I hold the rights). No, Those About to Die is the new Prime Video prestige drama directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Robert Rodat and starring Anthony Hopkins. And though it is my patriotic duty to shun all Paul Mescal-free Romanesque art (I speak of Gladiator 2: 2 Much Gladiator! which features Mescal in beefcake mode) it is also my journalistic duty to watch Those About to Die and tell you all about it. This is The Irish Times after all.
So is Those About to Die a David Simonesque deep dive into Roman engineering, the nuances of imperial class politics and the administration of empire? You can tell from the credit sequence – a river of blood gushing all over pristine marble statues while opera singers wail – that, no, it’s probably not.
Will it feature big men in small pants hacking at one another with swords when not arsing around in brothels? Yes, it definitely will. And I mean “arsing” in a literal sense. Nothing says “prestige drama” like some well-placed actorly buttocks. Indeed, the only thing missing from that blood-and-marble credit sequence is a montage of bums and possibly Hopkins’s ghostly revolving head wafting through the credit sequence whispering the words “bums” and “expensive!” and “This is actually a show about power”. Eventually the studios are just going to cut to the chase and get big-time-director types to film beautifully lit montages of bums. Roland Emmerich’s Montage of Bums? That’s Emmy bait, that is.
Those About to Die is set in CGI Rome. Its main protagonist is Tenax (the irrepressibly enjoyable Iwan Rheon), who is named much like a Roman might be named but also a bit like a Marvel villain or a vitamin supplement might be named. He’s an upwardly mobile bookie with a secret scheme to own one of Rome’s premier chariot teams. (These are called “factions”.)
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He is indeed a complicated man, and nobody understands him but his script superviser. Within a few minutes he has ordered a man’s throat to be cut and is then smiling benignly at some street urchins to show that he’s good really. (You can visualise the script note: “Have him smile at some children to make him likable after that murder he did.”)
His best chum and business partner is a champion charioteer called Scorpius (Dimitri Leonidas) who sometimes speaks in the third person, like the Hulk (“Scorpius needs a drink”), and who we first meet in a brothel having it off with his employer’s wife. We know it’s his employer’s wife because when Tenax bumps into them during their ancient Roman lurve he very helpfully says, “The wife of Consul Marsus, your boss, the owner of the blue faction!” That kind of dialogue saves a lot of time in a show like this, which has loads of characters and plot points to get through.
There’s also a hunter called Kwame (Moe Hashim) who specialises in catching CGI animals and soon finds himself forced to fight in the gladiatorial arena in which, a few episodes later, we see a huge man hack limbs off one of Kwame’s friends, one after the other. (“Tis but a scratch!” to quote a famous limbless warrior from cinema history.) His sisters have also been enslaved, and their mother (Sara Martins-Court) follows them all to Rome to buy their freedom. She also gathers more evidence that Tenax is good really, when he gruffly helps her out.
Elsewhere, two scions of the Flavian dynasty are in a struggle for control of the empire. “Scion” is an olden-days word for “nepo baby”. One of them is Titus (Tom Hughes), a gruff general with a hipster beard whose mistress is a Jewish princess who is trying to protect her people. The other is a shifty-eyed party politician called Domitian (an excellent JoJo Macari), who likes a flutter on the gee-gees. Neither of them is into porridge at all, which is a big disappointment to the patriarch of the Flavian dynasty. (Now that I think of it, I may be getting them mixed up with the Flahavan’s dynasty). Spoiler alert! Both Titus and Domitian rise to the position of emperor over time (source: a good classical education (real source: Wikipedia)). This just goes to show that anyone can achieve their dreams if their father is an emperor and their dream is “become an emperor”.
At the outset of the first episode the people are rioting because of a grain shortage. Domitian distracts them by holding a big chariot race at the Circus Maximus. The people of Rome react to a big horse race like a baby reacts to keys, and before long they are whooping and hooting along to the horseys instead of wrecking the gaff and engaging in grassroots organising. This move obviates the need for Titus’s army. So even though Domitian loses a lot of money on the horses he is happy with the outcome. “I won something more important,” he says. “I weakened my brother in my father’s eyes.” Who among us does not say this exact sentence once a week, specifically about our brother David?
Hopkins play their father, Vespasian, over in the Flavahan’s factory/imperial palace, but he barely appears in the story really. He’s written out by episode three. But an almost homeopathic dose of Hopkins is enough to launch a prestige drama in these straitened times, and I don’t blame them at all. The man is magnetic.
Those About to Die has faults, but they’re the faults shared by many contemporary big-budget period dramas – the ever-present CGI gives it scale but weightlessness; I don’t know how much more operatic caterwauling I can take from an olden-days soundtrack; it’s often portentous and silly at the same time (”Yes, the hunky man is dismembering the other hunky man, but our show is really an allegory for contemporary politics”) – yet it’s also well paced, excitingly dumb fun. Rheon is incredibly watchable as a scrappy underdog pulling one over on the Roman elite, and seeing Scorpius and his fellow charioteers race for a hollering crowd of loutish, easily distracted and prone-to-riot drunks, I was reminded a little of Cheltenham. So maybe I like sport now.
I certainly felt more warmly towards Tenax’s branch of the gambling industry than I do towards the celebrity endorsed sports-betting ads that blight contemporary commercial breaks. Even though Tenax sporadically kills indebted punters, I still think, on balance, that he ruins fewer lives than today’s online iteration of the gambling industry. I mean, look at that baying mob, living in the moment, not a phone in sight.
