Rome Season 2

[Reza]

New York Daily News -
A bumpy road out of 'Rome'

Saturday, January 13th, 2007

** 1/2


ROME. Tomorrow night at 9, HBO

The rise and fall of "Rome," HBO's ambitious mixture of ancient history and imaginative soap opera, has been as frustrating to watch as it has been rewarding.

The series itself, which returns for a second season tomorrow night at 9, has been as uneven, yet often as exciting, as any individual episode. Just when you're about to give up on it - in 2005, its first season didn't really kick in until more than halfway through - there's a scene in "Rome," or a performance, that pulls you back in.

The last we saw of "Rome," with the assassination of Julius Caesar, had the series leaving on a very high note - bold and bloody, with a cliffhanger as memorably dramatic as it was artistically filmed. But in real life, in the interim, HBO decided to pull the plug on "Rome" after one more season, forcing producers to race for the finish line and giving them license to concoct storylines and kill characters with abandon.

What could have been liberating feels, on the basis of this year's first four episodes, a bit rushed and haphazard instead. The male protagonists, Kevin McKidd as Vorenus and Ray Stevenson as Pullo, remain at the center, but their fortunes, like their tempers, rise and fall repeatedly and not always credibly. The female antagonists, Polly Walker as Atia and Lindsay Duncan as Servilia, carry their rivalry into deadly extremes in the second season - but their scenes this year aren't written as well.

Last year, the women ended up dominating "Rome," but this year they seem shuffled off to the side. Even Cleopatra, played by Lyndsey Marshal, is ill-served this season. As for the men, one of the standouts in both seasons, Max Pirkis as young Octavian, is replaced, jarringly, by Simon Woods midway through, as the character supposedly ages into a battle-hardened warrior. There was no need to replace Pirkis at all, and the switch hardly was a case of trading up.

James Purefoy, as Mark Antony, gets some more nice scenes as a strutting peacock of a Roman leader, but the gotta-keep-watching surprise this year is the subtle supporting performance by David Bamber as Cicero, whose character is a cunning survivor. Too bad "Rome" itself doesn't have his skill at escaping execution.