The acting was superb and they went to great lengths in production, as with Rome, to try to recreate the physicality and psychosocial feel of the period, and the very flawed nature of everyone on all sides of the conflict(s). If you like this era, you'll love this seven-part series. It was brilliant.
IMO, all historical fiction (and history, and human "knowledge"
is constructed and therefore ideological, but the better works of fiction and non-fiction at least try to be conscious of the worst anachronisms and humble about the rest.
I caught 10 minutes of Sons of Liberty last night, accidentally, and couldn't take the deliberate historical inaccuracies (exaggerations--shooting a child in the head), which I feel were there because they don't trust contemporary Americans to have enough subtlety to be outraged at what in fact did happen. That's what bothers me. They don't reflect on their own very assumptions.
I walked out of the 199x movie version of Elizabeth. The 1971 miniseries with Glenda Jackson actually attempted to capture some of the psychology of the period, as poor as the production values were. The one in the 1990s seemed aimed only at titillating modern audiences, just like that godawful Tudor series, which I tolerated for about 45 seconds.
Another awful thing was a TV movie about Homer where they actually had "him" (I don't know if people agree there was ever "one" Homer) walking around behaving like a journalist. I think the producers, who had evidently never learned about the differences between oral and literate cultures, really believed that a man interviewed Greeks and wrote the Odyssey from notes! That's not the same as the HBO series fictionalizing Titus and Pullo, because the producers really tried to get the capture the psychology of soldiers of that era, even though the characters were constructed.
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