Series Review: ‘I, Claudius’ (PBS)

Biting Roman Empire series paved the way for darker TV programming

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked I, Claudius—the first of two fiction books by Robert Graves about the Roman emperor—on a list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel ranked 14th. BBC adapted both Graves novels as a 1976 television series, which aired on state-sponsored PBS in America. It, too, was titled I, Claudius.

In its context and time, the 12-part series puts today’s prevalent television programming about families that tear each other apart—from the 1978 CBS series Dallas, Fox’s Married with Children and HBO’s The Sopranos to Game of Thrones and Succession—into sharper perspective. I, Claudius makes them seem like child’s play.

Like the other shows, the series is at first inviting, biting, salacious and often witty as fictionalization of family, sex, eroticism, incest and power. Its’ nudity was considered shocking (it wasn’t, then or now). Framed by Claudius as an old man writing his memoirs, who is, in the first few episodes, depicted as a foolish boy—he twitches, stutters and limps—the main character is thought to be simple-minded.

Claudius, the audience already knows, is not. From this direct premise about an underdog who’s underestimated—one who clearly endures, in spite of being ridiculed, mocked and persecuted—springs the basic conflict. Perhaps, because the dramatization of the end of the Roman Empire forecasts eerie parallels to today’s headlines and doomed civilization (which feels more ominous every day), I, Claudius seems important, relevant and meaningful.

From early episodes’ false rape claims, a conniving brother and father and a diabolical mother, Livia (Sian Phillips), as the arch-villainess, to the end, I, Claudius in the year of America’s bicentennial casts an oddly habit-forming gloomy cloud over the West in white tunics and columns on sets draped in gray and beige.

The longer you watch, the more you notice the parts foreshadowing modern times. As the plot escalates the salacious and horrendous twists, from bloody murder in nearly every episode to every form of depravity you can imagine, the longer the series seems. I, Claudius, co-starring young Patrick Stewart as Sejanus and John Hurt as Caligula, climaxes with an adult eating a fetus. This comes long after realizing, if gradually, that the series exists to titillate, not to provoke thought and illuminate.

Derek Jacobi in the title role is stupendous. He carries the series, which entirely revolves around his character and what he will or will not do, know, discover, write about and describe for the sake of history. I’m satisfied to have watched this series, which was watched every night in my home when I was a child as it was televised, and, frankly, I am relieved that I finally did. I never want to see I, Claudius again.

Nor do I feel compelled to recommend I, Claudius, unless you want to see it with these thoughts in mind. My revulsion comes not from its low quality. I, Claudius, like most TV programming with British accented casts, initially seems better than the sum of its parts. My gastrointestinal disgust comes from knowing that, in its own way, the TV show based on the novels about the fall of the Roman Empire mocks itself as it makes way for a glut of programs about families that fuck, slaughter and eat eachother. That these bleak, vile, biting shows became popular—arguably hastening the demise of reading, literature, exercise of free speech, appreciation for romantic realism in art and the lighter, American sense of life—isn’t caused by I, Claudius and its bloody beatdown of every ruler from Augustus to Caligula and Nero, from the year 24 BC to AD 54. Depicting Ancient Rome on TV, in retrospect, merely trumped history with vulgarity.