I'll preface my review by saying that I ploughed through Mike Duncan's The History of Rome podcast which is several hundreds of hours long and insanely in depth. Colosseum contained eight compelling stories which were entirely new to me, not having been covered in the podcast or my other studies on Rome, and did them really well.
Now, that doesn't mean that it covers them in depth at 40 minutes an episode, but the story choices are well chosen and the show is well conceived, well executed and well told.
Colosseum is part documentary, part dramatisation. A narrator covers the vast majority of what is going on, backed up by talking head experts and with important scenes acted out. Generally this works really well.
The narration is excellent. Robert Cargill strikes the perfect note in his speech. The script is good and covers the important notes of giant books of history in a swift manner. It leans more towards getting the story of the individuals across and that's fine because the stories are powerful.
The talking heads are the weakest part of the production, and not because of who they are or what they have to say, but because the interviews are clipped into two or three sentence soundbites and sprinkled throughout the episode. It does work within the context of the show, but the soundbites do leave you wanting to hear a bit more from the historians.
The dramatisations are excellent - if you ignore the clearly limited budget. You are not getting big budget cgi here or Hollywood choreographed fights. However, the Director and Editor are on the ball, the CGI has been stylised so that once you buy into the non photorealistic style, it works perfectly well. The Gladiatorial fights are edited well enough to hide the fact that there wasn't the budget to take things to a higher level safely and that's absolutely fine. You'll also spot occasional continuity errors or reused shots, but none of this takes away from the production. Because what shines in the production is the actors. The actors in each story have just three or four scenes and not much more than a few lines in which to establish a historical character in a way that can sustain the episode. As a former actor myself, I know that this is a tough ask because characters are created from their dialogue and actions. The less you have to go on, the more has to be made up and the more of a sketch or caricature the character can fall into. I have to say that each and every one of the main actors in these stories brings in a complete and compelling character that could sustain an entire season, not just a few scenes in a single episode. Excellent work by all involved.
And of course this is a History Channel production. It is an excellent presentation of History, taught me plenty that I didn't already know and was highly enjoyable. More like this please.
