zepoodle wrote:
Ambrya wrote:
Well, eventually there was the entire reign of Caligula, not to mention the reign of his extremely warped @#%^phile grandfather.
Old Rome still had plenty of juicy fodder for an adult-only series. Problem was, the production values were too high. The show simply cost too much to make.
That's the thing, though. Caligula is what, 38AD? The entire cast would be dead by then. I'm not saying that it's not a good idea to make a TV series about the emperors, but it would be a totally different series to what
Rome was.
We'll never really know what
Rome was, or at least what it was meant to be, because the producers decided to end it in the face of the astronomical production values.
There's good reason to believe that the show was, indeed, intended to be about the emperors in sequence season by season, seeing as how the first season was about Julius Ceasar and the second about the rise of Octavian/Augustus, which is certainly suggestive of a scheme where each season focused on a different emperor.
Yes, because of the chronology of these events, most of the actors crossed over from one season to another the first two seasons. But seeing how willing they were to swap the actor who played young Octavian for an older actor when they fast-forwarded several years, and how many major characters died along the way, there's no reason to believe they wouldn't have been willing to replace the whole cast as history marched forward.
In fact, the only thing that suggests they might not have had exactly that scenario in mind is the "view from the gallery" thing they had going on with events transpiring with Vorenus and Pullo always getting mixed up in it all.
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It's just, looking at the way it was written, the story fits perfectly into a two-season structure. It definitely doesn't feel like it was cut off prematurely. It feels like they looked at the historical material, looked at the cost per episode, then wrote a show that would cover both in two seasons.
It looked that way, but that's not actually what happened. The show was intended to go on longer than two seasons, but the production costs were simply too high. A pity, because it was so incredibly, incredibly gorgeous.