As for Jack Pulman and Herbert Wise’s 1976 TV series? To call it a masterpiece is to understate the case. With a cast that turns over completely mid-series, it keeps churning out compelling new characters, brought to life with performances that feel rivetingly true to life yet grandiose enough to burn Rome down around them. Brian Blessed, Siân Phillips, George Baker, Patrick Stewart, Patricia Quinn, John Hurt, Sheila White, and Derek Jacobi alone sear themselves in your memory with their terrible energy; they are the glistening tip of a spear made of ace supporting players seemingly without end.

With a budget and design aesthetic more attuned to live theater than broadcast television, it uses deft camerawork and industry-best blocking of its actors to draw the audience into a conspiracy of make-believe. Long takes that allow you to sink into the acting and thus inhabit a world you know is not real; you may not be there, but you are there. Since so much of the work is done in-camera, when the series does resort to visual effects or striking editing choices, they hit like a freight train. Try shaking the feeling of all those characters talking directly to you in this episode, I dare you.

What emerges paramount from it all, from those spectral faces looming in the lens on down, is the feeling of ancient history speaking to the present. It is madness, madness, to trade away hard-learned, hard-fought moral and political principles for the expediency of autocracy. The lives of first Augustus and then Claudius himself prove there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship; surrender your rights and you have no right to complain when you are forced to surrender far more. 

I reviewed the series finale of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. What a show!

It should be noted here that Sheila White, the beautiful actor playing Messalina, is frequently shown nude throughout this episode, as are her male lovers. Her fuckathon battle with Scylla is described with shocking frankness, and when you see the aftermath – Scylla, her hair mussed, her chest slicked with sweat or saliva or, well, you know – there’s no question what has taken place. I kept reacting like Tim Robinson in that one I Think You Should Leave sketch: “I don’t know if you’re allowed to do that.”

I reviewed the penultimate episode of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. Gift link!

In retrospect, there was one clear warning sign. Yes, Messalina, the sweet, beautiful, precociously competent and intelligent teenage girl to whom Claudius was forcibly wed by his demented uncle Caligula, makes the newly crowned emperor happy. Yes, she helps him immeasurably in his work. Yes, she’s the mother of first one, then two children by him. Yes, it seems like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

Until she says this: “My darling, I want to be Livia to your Augustus!”

Oh dear.

I reviewed the eleventh episode of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. Gift link!