Was Rome actually considered good? I watched it and considered it spectacularly mediocre.
It's one of the greatest shows ever made. It had grand production values before Game of Thrones was even thought of as a television show, and it used them to great effect along with the actors. It had expert pacing, style, and heightened drama. It told a well-worn story with characters you felt like you knew, not just because of history but because of the actors who portrayed them. The writing in particular is terrific and takes a lot of bloody, violent events and actually makes them fun.
I hate to compare Rome to GoT in the GoT thread because I still love GoT, but Rome compares very favorably in a few key areas.
For one, it has a beautiful, cohesive soundtrack that brings whole scenes to life, rather than just playing a single theme every time a certain character does something.
Its set design is unmatched. Comparing the relatively bland house banners and rags that adorn everyone in GoT, people in Rome have hundreds of different clothing types.
Rome actually had a battle sequence in its second season that rivals in terms of scope anything you see in GoT. It may not have the heightened drama of Blackwater, but all things considered, they did it really well.
Rome was cancelled because it ran over budget and wasn't as popular, but it used that budget to stunning effect. In Rome, they conveyed a huge number of events that were happening to famous political figures AND common people without wasting time, or replaying the same story beats. Every character was portrayed as very human alongside their slimy demeanor, and there are
NO "good" characters on Rome. The final battle was between a snake and an even bigger snake. Rome did that first too.
In Game of Thrones, you have hundreds of millions of dollars that they spend on everything to convey all these locations across continents with many characters and families struggling for power or to find someone/seek revenge.
It usually goes something like this
-Character somewhere against their will to provide a human side for the incomprehensible monsters
-Two characters traveling the countryside or sitting in a room to provide exposition
-Characters traveling with an army
-Big event that more or less serves as a culmination of all the exposition or traveling
Rome did all of these things, but also unraveled the humanity and griminess of its world. It took big characters and made them small, and made them big again, often in the same episode.
Game of Thrones has so much, and often does so little with it.
Rome had (relatively) so little, and did so much with it.
Unlike Rome, you often get the sense that the characters in Game of Thrones are fighting just so they can fight some more. In Rome, characters wanted peace and stability. They talked with their enemies because like people, they probably realized that talking is preferable to fighting.
I have never gotten the sense that there are places in Westeros where people don't get killed by the thousands at every second of every day.
In Rome, events are being depicted that actually consisted (in real life) of men being slaughtered by the thousands. Yet I was able to learn about an ex-soldier who had to take up the butchering trade to keep himself busy, a noble daughter who had been passed around to various noblemen like a prostitute because of politics/conflict (sound familiar? only they didn't botch it like they did Sansa), and a brutish old soldier who didn't know how to do anything but fight, and this was his DOWNFALL, not his strength (like it is with Ramsay).
Rome is not without its faults. Some events are rushed, but I can't blame them because they had to take everything they had been planning for a 5+ season run and cram it into about 5 episodes, and they actually did it as well as could have been expected. It also takes so many liberties with actual history that you can't correctly call it a historical drama in any sense. It's historical fiction.
It's clear to me now that over the past two seasons, Game of Thrones has been getting by on two things: Great acting and great spectacle. The storytelling is good, but it doesn't match the acting or the spectacle. They even took moments that were iconic in the books (Tyrion killing Shae/Tywin) and made them fairly tame and without any real tension.
In conclusion, I'm sure the people who ran Rome would have KILLED to have even a quarter of the terrific locations and rich background story. All they had was some well-trodden history and a couple dozen actors to bring some flavor to it all.
Watch "The Spoils". There's a scene in there that actually made me jump up and cheer, like if I were at a sporting event. There are great scenes in Game of Thrones, but the vast majority happen with the least amount of tension possible. You're already pretty sure of their outcome beforehand because you've been trained to believe that everything sucks, and nothing good ever happens unless good characters are killing someone bad for revenge.
In conclusion, comparing Rome directly to Game of Thrones is perhaps not fair. Their aims are different. Their source material is different. Their cast and crew are different. But everything Rome does demonstrably better than Game of Thrones is
SO fixable. GoT can do anything it wants with the characters (clearly), and could have made us care about them as much as I care about Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus.
This was a show that was initially about Caesar's rise and fall, and we all know how that turned out. So why was I still compelled by the second season? Because they created sensible storylines and raised the stakes rather than lowering them.
