Summer is for swords and sandals, and all eyes will be on the gladiators and their bloody games in this 10-episode series directed by Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow) and set in Rome during the 1st century A.D. Anthony Hopkins plays Vespasian, the stable-by-Roman standards emperor who commissioned the building of the Colosseum. Iwan Rheon (Game of Thrones) co-stars as an underworld boss who controls gambling on gladiator fights and other spectacles. Thursday, July 18, Peacock.

by Emily Nusssbaum

"Sometimes it's the author, not the subject," said Bruce Handy in Air Mail. Even if you care little about reality shows, Emily Nussbaum's "extremely entertaining" new history of the genre will make for hours of happy reading. The New Yorker staff writer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, interviewed 300 people who participated at every level in the making of several landmark shows, and the result is a book that's "the reality-TV equivalent to sweeping, gossipy, astute Hollywood histories such as Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." Reality TV's modern era unquestionably began "when the first season of Survivor became a low-risk, high-profit, out-of-left-field smash hit in the summer of 2000." But Nussbaum wisely doesn't start with that industry-altering breakthrough, instead turning back the clock to reveal how long America has been fascinated by a TV genre she likes to refer to as "dirty documentary." 

Candid Camera arguably birthed reality TV in the 1940s, said Carole V. Bell in NPR .org. As Nussbaum moves from that origin point to Gong Show creator Chuck Barris to the 1973 PBS docuseries An American Family, she "successfully walks a tightrope" by exposing reality TV's exploitative habits where necessary while savoring the drama and humor that often appeared on our glowing screens. And when her account arrives at the year 2000, "Nussbaum's storytelling reaches the height of its powers in a blow-by-blow of Survivor Season 1 that will give you the creepy crawlies: fleas under the skin, snakes on the belly, parasites in the intestines." Even then, "it's hard to figure what's more treacherous," the wildlife on the island where contestants were trapped throughout the show's elimination contest or the production crew "committed to making compelling TV at any cost." 

"One area in which Nussbaum treads lightly is reality TV's fitful relationship with race," said Eric Deggans in The New York Times. Though Cue the Sun's most "attention-getting" anecdote, denied by Donald Trump's team, is a producer's recollection that the future president used the N-word to refer to an early finalist on The Apprentice, Nussbaum skims past allegations of racial discrimination on hit shows including Survivor, The Real World, and The Bachelor. Meanwhile, one thread that runs through Nussbaum's narrative is the number of times critics of reality TV have declared the genre finished, said Maura Judkis in The Washington Post. Those nay-sayers should be more cautious. "Reality television has outlasted every attempt to write its obituary and will surely outlast those of us who compose them, too."

The screenwriter who penned Chinatown

Robert Towne's mastery of storytelling made him the major voice in the New Hollywood wave of the 1970s. Nominated for best-screenplay Oscars three years in a row, including for The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1975), he won with the gritty noir Chinatown (1974), a tale of greed and corruption centering on water rights in Los Angeles. The script, still taught in film schools as a masterpiece of three-act structure, was a struggle for Towne. He wrote it as a vehicle for his good friend and roommate Jack Nicholson. But he butted heads with director Roman Polanski, who insisted on a much darker ending than Towne had envisioned, and the two men battled for weeks. Polanski's gut-punch finish — "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown" — was like "the tunnel at the end of the light," Towne said. But he later conceded, "Chinatown would have been a disaster without him." 

Born Robert Bertram Schwartz — his shop-owner father later changed the family name — Towne grew up in the working-class port of San Pedro, Calif. After studying literature and philosophy at Pomona College, he moved to Los Angeles to start work in the B-movie world of Roger Corman. Thanks to his "pitch-perfect dialogue and soul-searching vignettes," said The Washington Post, he quickly became sought after as a script doctor, writing a pivotal scene in The Godfather (1972). But his "talent came with baggage." Renowned as "a perfectionist," said Deadline, he tended to "disappear for months to work on a scene." Still, actors like Tom Cruise adored him. He wrote the Cruise flicks Days of Thunder (1990) and The Firm (1993) as well as the first two Mission Impossible films. 

Towne's directing career was marked by "intelligent passion projects," said The Guardian, but the results were mixed. The first film he directed, Personal Best (1982), was a box-office flop, and he had affairs with both co-stars, Patrice Donnelly and Mariel Hemingway. Tequila Sunrise (1988) was a hit, but his attempt at a Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes (1990) saw him removed from the director's chair. Yet toward the end of his life, he returned to the Chinatown story, co-writing a yet-unreleased prequel series for Netflix that goes into the backstory of the Nicholson character. "Small details that are touched on in the film are given life and breadth," he said this year, "in a way that surprised even me."