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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
HBO has become hostage to its own success. We now expect its dramas not only to make us feel--a trick that any scriptwriter can perform by giving a tot a limp or a dog--but, rarest of joys, to make us think. The corpse-eating pigs and baroquely obscene insults on "Deadwood," for instance, served an argument that democracy in America emerged as the by-product of ruthless men's determination to preserve their wealth--in other words, as a cost of doing business.
With "Rome," a co-production with the BBC which returns this Sunday for its second (and final) season, HBO seemed, at first, to wrestle with its own reputation. The show labored to shatter our preconceptions about the slow-motion civil wars that followed Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon; evidently figuring that the oratory of the Julii had been dramatized by everyone from Shakespeare to Guccione, the series' creators opted for a grimy, Hogarthian look at everyday Italian life--"Deadwood" in tunics. Of course, you can't prune every scenic cliche from a sword-and-sandal epic, and "Rome" had its enjoyable share of sly eunuchs, assassins' faces webbed with blood, legionaries in their clanking baldrics and cuirasses, and lounging nobles nibbling, in turn, on a fig...
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