YMMV / The Cleopatras

• Narm:
  • Any hope that the series would mark a return to form for The BBC's costume dramas after the massive critical failure of The Borgias a couple of years prior was dashed approximately thirty seconds into the first episode, which opened up on an extreme close-up of Graham Crowden's character Theodotus wearing such an extreme amount of make-up that he resembles a drag queen.
  • The acting and writing in general are very hit-and-miss. Most notable is the ending of the first episode. While the queen is no doubt intended to be momentarily shocked into silence by the sight of her son's decapitated head before letting out an almighty scream, actress Elizabeth Shepherd's blank expression instead gives the impression that she's forgotten her line, before remembering that she didn't actually have a line and was just meant to scream.
• One-Scene Wonder: Patrick Troughton's all-too-brief cameo as Sextus.
• Retroactive Recognition: Cleopatra IV is played by Sue Holderness, who would later be best known for playing Marlene Boyce in Only Fools and Horses and The Green Green Grass.
• So Bad, It's Good: The series opens with an extreme close-up of Graham Crowden plastered with more make-up than any of the actresses that appear in the series (in fact, all the male characters wear more makeup than their female counterparts), and only gets more and more ridiculous from there. Add in direction and editing from a Queen music video, a pseudo-prog rock soundtrack, and a script that can never decide how seriously to take itself, and you can see why most people considered The BBC's costume dramas to be out of fashion for most of the early Eighties.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: One of the reasons this production flopped so badly. It becomes apparent long before the last Cleopatra takes the throne that this family isn't going to get any better; generation after generation involves depraved sociopaths trying to depose and/or murder their equally depraved relatives to gain power for power's sake, and those who succeed in gaining power spend their reigns casually massacring any subjects (or family members) who displease them. With no protagonists who were either sympathetic or entertainingly villainous, the audiences of 1983 felt they had no reason to care about them.

---