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Those About to Die Series-Premiere Recap: Draft Kings
Peacock’s latest series knows that sometimes you want to see sexy people in gladiator uniforms fighting and using old-timey accents.
Even the source material — the dubiously accurate and extraordinarily lurid “history” of Roman gladiatorial games and combat-sport spectacles by Daniel P. Mannix, the cover blurb of which is transcribed above — is the kind of thing you’d find moldering on your granddad’s bookshelf. Titus (Tom Hughes) is a general like his father, but he has a reputation for being too enamored with Berenice (Lara Wolf), the sexy Judaean queen whose people he subjugated and brought back to construct a grand new athletic amphitheater in his dynasty’s name. Unfortunately for his sleazy but actually pretty smart and effective politician brother, Domitian (Jojo Macari), Titus has his father’s skill set as a soldier, and the old man sees the external threats posed by the barbarians of Europe and Asia as greater than political infighting.
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