Am I correct in remembering they didn’t say “fuck” in the 1st season? I remember Octavia asking Antony about having coitus with her mother.

I thought Purefoy overdid the lizardliness of Mark Antony. The tilted back head, the slitted eyes, the elongated but closed mouth with tongue right behind the lips. He was just leaning into lizard too hard.

I didn’t watch ROME when it first aired because of the way it was marketed. The red clad soldier, a sword, a pool of blood. I thought it was going to be a lot of battle scenes and I hate battle scenes. Give me clever dialogue, interesting plot lines, character development. But don’t give me clanging swords and screams.

(And magic is boring to me. Oh look, dragons. That means magic can be used instead of intellect. I like to see human characters have to deal with other human characters without an abracadabra easy way out.)

I had free premium channels due to a cablevision mistake. Figuring they’d take it away from me soon I watched as much HBO as I could and figured, “Eh. ROME. I’ll watch it.” From the opening theme - music and animation that suggested humans lived so closely with animals that they behaved like animals - it had me hooked. I disapproved of the idiotic lesbian relationship and of Kerry Condon’s overly-available skinny ass being in view too many times. Blech.

But the character of Lucius Vorenus was complex and unpredictable. Who hasn’t known someone like him? You think you know him because he’s so vocal about his beliefs and he tells other people what to do with some wisdom…then he freaks the fuck out. Pullo is all upfront. He shows you who he is and you know what to expect from him. But you don’t really know what Vorenus is going to do next — yet it wasn’t unbelievable, the way some characters change from good to bad in soap operas, then back to good again. Vorenus was always at war with himself. I thought McKidd did an excellent job at making him believable.

I liked The Roman hippie Jocasta for comic relief, and hissed at the slave Gaia. the Roman Jeanine Garafalo. I laughed at Marcus Agrippa with the map of Ireland on his face. But I guess to the British, an Irishman is the equivalent of a Roman pleb. Poor Alan Leech, so often playing the lower class fellow who rises in status but is never fully accepted.

I couldn’t understand why they bothered with the character of Timon, he was so inconsequential. Then I heard Bruno Heller’s original concept was to move the story along to Israel at the time of Jesus Christ and it all made sense.

I read an interview with someone who said they had lunch with Kevin McKidd after GoT became a hit and he fumed, “They stole our 5 seasons!” He was right. ROME was so much better.