January Meme: What historical figure/event/era you would make a television show about?
Some previous replies to this question by lirazel from years ago are here, but thankfully, history offers so much territory that I can always come up with another additional potential tv series. (Btw, let me add that looking back to that five-season-of-Frederick-the-Great treatment I wrote ages ago when I knew far less: I still think it would be excellent material for a tv show, especially knowing so much more now about the other boyfriends and siblings. And the envoys.)
So, this time around, I would like to offer some literary material to be filmed, to wit, Lion Feuchtwanger's trilogy of novels about the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus/Josef ben Matthias. For informative reviews, see cahn's write-up of the trilogy here and skygiants's review of the first volume here. It has it all: a morally ambiguous, controversial main character, constant identity clashes, all the different cultures around the Mediterranean, the second Roman-Jewish war in volume 1 and the sadly still contemporary question of how to live as a writer in a dictatorship in volume 3, and a very slashy relationship between our antihero and his life long frenemy Justus.
Now, something needs to be done about the female characters. Not that there aren't any interesting ones, especially Berenice in volume 1 and Lucia in the later half of 2 and all through 3, but the way the narrative treats most of them is, shall we say, dated. (Though they don't get fridged, I hasten to add.) However, that's why it's an adaption. I would like to point to the miniseries Masada, set during the same era, which is not only better in general than the novel it's based on (called The Antagonists), but in particular because of how it treats Sheba, the most important female character. And that was made decades ago. So I think you can use the novels as the main material to base the tv show on while still fleshing out the female characters, which would not change the larger plot lines but would add to them.
The other days
So, this time around, I would like to offer some literary material to be filmed, to wit, Lion Feuchtwanger's trilogy of novels about the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus/Josef ben Matthias. For informative reviews, see cahn's write-up of the trilogy here and skygiants's review of the first volume here. It has it all: a morally ambiguous, controversial main character, constant identity clashes, all the different cultures around the Mediterranean, the second Roman-Jewish war in volume 1 and the sadly still contemporary question of how to live as a writer in a dictatorship in volume 3, and a very slashy relationship between our antihero and his life long frenemy Justus.
Now, something needs to be done about the female characters. Not that there aren't any interesting ones, especially Berenice in volume 1 and Lucia in the later half of 2 and all through 3, but the way the narrative treats most of them is, shall we say, dated. (Though they don't get fridged, I hasten to add.) However, that's why it's an adaption. I would like to point to the miniseries Masada, set during the same era, which is not only better in general than the novel it's based on (called The Antagonists), but in particular because of how it treats Sheba, the most important female character. And that was made decades ago. So I think you can use the novels as the main material to base the tv show on while still fleshing out the female characters, which would not change the larger plot lines but would add to them.
The other days