canman1971 wrote:Ill News wrote:I just finished watching Rome. It's fantastic, but it's a damn shame that a show about the birth of the Roman Empire would be cancelled after only 2 seasons. This deserved at least 5 seasons. It definitely laid the groundwork for shows like Game of Thrones, Vikings, Spartacus, etc. Hopefully they can bring it back sometime in the future; they can pick up right where they left off with Augustus Caesar's reign, or focus on another period of Roman history, say Aurelian's campaign to "restore the world" during the Third Century Crisis. That would be must-see TV.
It's a great short series. I read that is was just too costly to continue. They were supposed to do a feature film to finish it off, but so far nothing.
I agree that it's great, but it could've been so much more. For one, I found it annoying that they barely showed any battles (for example, there was so much buildup to the Pharsalus showdown between Caesar and Pompey, but they didn't even show the battle and just cut to the aftermath immediately, which I felt cheated out of); also, the second half of season 2 was so condensed and rushed, a lot of storylines would've benefited from being fleshed out. I actually thought the finale was lame, it just felt like the writers wanted to wrap it up without really trying to hit the emotional beats of the audience.
That said, it was still a fantastic show with great writing and acting, and the production was superb. As you said, it was simply too costly. HBO certainly learned their lesson in Game of Thrones, where they were able to make better use of the budgets in the first few seasons, then went all-out in the later ones when the show had a global following already. Maybe if Rome didn't shoot its wad right out of the gate in terms of its production budget, it would've lasted longer. There's just
so much story to tell, and it's a shame that most of them got cut out.
Given how horrible the last two seasons of GoT were, I think HBO should make it up to us by giving us another Rome series. I'd be down with that.
