This is Modernist Succession, it’s Modernist Succession… Claudius is a Tom/Greg hybrid, Livia is Logan, I can go on lol… Jesse Armstrong is so British, I think the non-Peep Show watching crowd overshadows this fact
British television had such wonderful ways of working around painfully obvious budgetary constraints… u can also tell when they had a little money for a scene bc they go all out
It doesn’t have the weight of other BBC stuff like Blackstuff, compares very favorably with Our Friends From The North (performances, camerawork, time working in years and decades instead of days and months), though Claudius doesn’t reach its heights… there’s a level of separation to being so far away from the day-to-day of Rome, even just the senate (Augustus having ulcers from overworking confused me bc he barely does any politicking past the first episode, maybe that’s the joke tho lol), that makes this almost hinge on a chamber drama, it’s audacious (in its willingness to kill and cast this wide, cross-generational conspiratorial net) and often works (and is often very funny), but at the same time you don’t feel/see how this chamber drama avalanches into real destruction like Succession does, it’s the difference between a revolution of society and a new reproduction of society… even still, I couldn’t help but marvel at a work so anachronistic and complex that still feels so natural and trim and followable
There’s an actor in this show that is very obviously where Matt Berry learned his stuff from and it’s sensational and instantly recognizable
