Those about to Die (series): Quite disappointing and I tapped out after 2 episodes

Who doesn't like a bit of history about the Roman Empire? I tend to enjoy these sorts of things or at least generally have a lot of time for them. I wanted to see this because it had a relatively big budget and also had one of my favorite actors of all time, Anthony Hopkins, in a lead role.

Unfortunately, Roman history has been turned into a soap opera of sorts that all seem to take place inside of the same 5 blocks of city aside from some scenes that are meant to take place in far away lands. Even in those scenes, things are so cheaply done that we don't spend much time there and it was done only to introduce a character that is going to be important later. My expectations of something as anticipated as this might have been too high because I found myself bored and rolling my eyes and the near complete absence of historical accuracy has a lot of people really worked up about this series.

That being said: I have no intention of continuing to watch this because the way they are telling the story just doesn't appeal to me.

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Perhaps they were attempting to cash in on the fact that Gladiator 2 has been in the news a lot lately, even though perhaps for the wrong reasons. A lot of people highly anticipated this series' release for the same reasons that I was doing so, only to be let down for similar reasons to my own.

The trailer makes the series look like it is going to be a spectacular demonstration of Rome's colosseum games including gladiator battles as well as horse chariot races and well, that is what it centers around. However, it doesn't take very long watching this to realize that perhaps the showrunners bit off more than they could chew with their ideas and because of that, a great deal of the CGI filled sequences just end up looking hilariously fake.

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Some have referred to this series as Peacocks's desperate attempt to get their own "Game of Thrones" and if that was in fact the intention, I'm afraid they seriously missed the mark on that. The characters, including Vespasian (played by Hopkins) are very boring and one-dimensional. The performance from the usually outstanding Hopkins seems "dialed in" as if he didn't really care about this series but they made him a big offer of some cash. The rest of the cast consist of people I have never heard of and well, this is unlikely to springboard their careers to the next level because it seems as though most people kind of have a lukewarm reception to it.

I have written at great length about how I am not a fan at all of series or films that forego good storytelling when they know they are going to have a ton of CGI and green-screen tech at their disposal and this series really epitomizes this notion only they didn't have enough money to make this technology convincing either.

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I would imagine that it is extremely difficult to recreate a 4 or 5 team chariot race inside of a coliseum when the coliseum, the chariots, and the horses, aren't actually even there... but now introduce a very limited budget to attempt to pretend these things are there and we have a really big problem.

What the series attempts to fall back on is to get us invested in the individual characters' lives and how there are several houses vying for control of the throne. The problem here is that the actors are not very gifted and much of the performances just seem like overacting. I can't be too judgmental of these people because it must be very taxing to pretend in your mind that there is some sort of glorious surroundings about you (as an actor) when in reality you are on a soundstage in Canada with green screen all around you.

While we have no idea what the chariot races were ever actually like, when the introduce "drifting" into the competition I can't help but think "was this the idea of some out-of-touch producer attempting to connect with a younger audience?" It's just kind of stupid and doesn't really add anything to the overall story.

It is evident what is going to happen before it happens and that was what made the first 2 episodes slog by in my mind and ultimately resulted in me giving up on this. There are also moments of what appears to be forced diversity and I'm kind of done complaining about that at this point. This is just the world we live in now, love it or leave it.

Should I watch it?

I hesitate to tell people that this show sucks because it doesn't, it just didn't live up to the hype. I think there was a lot of potential for them to really make this a "Game of Thrones" type of epic story that was at least to some degree based in historical fact, but that isn't really what I feel we ended up getting here. They needed a lot more money than they apparently had to pull this off and as strange as it might sound, $140 million just doesn't appear as though it was enough. So much in this looks fake that it turned me off pretty early. Seriously, watch the fight with the white lion that takes place early in episode 1 and see if you don't feel exactly the same way.

I will not tell you to avoid this though because it might be something that some people would enjoy. Hell, I may even turn it on to have on the background while I am cleaning my house but as far as getting invested in the story, after 2 episodes I wasn't invested in any of the characters and everything in the story seems to be just plodding along and filling up time in order to get to the next coliseum game that is next in line.

_{The only legal way to stream this show is by a Peacock subscription or on Amazon Prime}