Latest proof that western civilisation is over: Sky Atlantic’s Domina reviewed

I’ve been looking at the reviews so far of Sky’s new Romans series Domina and none seems to have noticed the most salient point: it’s crap. This is almost more depressing than the fact that the series got made in the first place, for what it suggests is this: our culture is now so debased that even our arbiters of taste can no longer tell the difference between quality and mediocrity.

Domina follows the story of Julius Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian, from when he was a member of the triumvirate to his apotheosis as Caesar Augustus. You’d think you couldn’t possibly go wrong with such fascinating historical material, rich with gore, scheming, politicking, backstabbing and will to power. But Domina says: ‘Hold my cervisia!’ and renders it dreary beyond endurance.

Instead of viewing these events from Augustus’s perspective (men, eh, what did they ever do for us?) we instead see them from the perspective of his wife Livia Drusilla. According to Tacitus, she was a nasty piece of work: ‘A blight upon the nation as a mother, a blight upon the house of Caesar as a stepmother.’ And, as played by Siân Phillips in the 1970s TV adaptation of I, Claudius, she was a vicious, manipulative cow. But in Domina, she is reinvented as a generic, empowered woman, such as we should all admire and emulate. At any moment, you expect one of the characters, perhaps her African ex-slave companion Antigone, to say: ‘You go, girl!’

You might think I jest, but characters do say things like ‘wow!’. They also swear an awful lot. The first episode feels a bit like Skins, only in togas, with good-looking, edgy yoof — no doubt the products of London’s finest private schools — whoring, lusting, enjoying oral sex, swaggering and killing like the spoiled Roman rich kids they are.

This makes it sound like a Roman version of Game of Thrones, which would be great, if it were, but it isn’t.