Probably about ten years after the rest of the population, I got Netflix last week. So much to watch, so many cultural references to finally understand. But what to watch first?

The first series to grace that special hour between bottles one and two, was not Breaking Bad or The Crown but Barbarians the new(ish) German six parter detailing the road to the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest massacre 9AD where three whole legions were massacred by assorted German tribes under Arminius (see my blog on this battle, and the Roman follow up here).

My overall verdict? About five out of ten. Six maybe.

I thought the Latin for the Romans and German (dubbed English) for the Germans was a good idea. Nice to hear what the Romans actually sounded like. To be fair though, unless they said status quo, vini, vidi, vici or carpe diem, I wouldn’t have a bloody clue what the actors were declaiming. Could have been Tahitian.

The actor playing Arminius - an actor called Laurence Rupp was the major weakness. His idea of showing his character’s conflict at being torn between two cultures was to a) look as though he was going to cry b) imitate a plank of wood. He mainly went for the wooden style. I couldn’t see him rallying a stag party with free booze at the Munich bierfest, let alone coalescing together the internecine hatred of the German tribes to attack the might of Rome.

HIs overlong, intercut and frankly gibberish soliloquy to the severed head of Varus disrupting the climatic battle scene was a particular low point. What should have been the dramatic climax of the series turned into a real life conflict between me fast forwarding and the writer jerking off platitudes.

The armour and period detail looked correct which makes Roman army pedants like myself happy. To be fair, it was hard to get this wrong as, in 9AD, the Roman army looked pretty much exactly as you’d picture them - all lorica segmentata and curved helmets. But it was all so small scale! We’ve been spoilt with the grandeur of movies like Gladiator or even Spartacus as casts of thousands of extras duly trooped back and forth into gigantic battles. Here they were clearly on a budget. Arminius’ auxiliary cavalry command was basically him and six other hairy blokes.

There was the usual Woden, will of the wisp, dress up the shaman in a funny costume, old gods shite that seem to populate these sorts of series (I think it shared some of the same production staff as Amazon’s lamentable Vikings). The main female character, played by Jeanne Goursaud, flipped between naked romps with the two main male leads and wearing a funny sub-Marvel outfit whilst slicing one her eyes out with a stone knife. A ‘wise woman’ apparently.

To summarise: The Romans were bastards. The tribes liked fighting each other. Some of the acting was as wooden as the Teutoburg Forest itself. The period detail looked okay. It was very small scale. Some of the history was off but not annoyingly so. I fell asleep twice and had to spool though the episodes trying to remember where I’d dropped off. Could have been the wine.

Anyway, bring on Germanicus and Tiberius in series two to give these tribes a good kicking in the lesser known, but just as devastating, Roman response to the loss of the eagles at Teutoburg.

Click here, for my review of Sky’s Domina…

For my series on Roman Battles, click here…