Quick Take: Party Like, "A Roman Emperor"
NatGeo's new show compares ancient parties to modern day throwdowns.
Review: Party Like, "A Roman Emperor"
(S0102) I haven't been having very much luck with NatGeo shows this week, so I wasn't particularly thrilled at first in checking out the channel's new series, Party Like. Party Like premiered with back-to-back episodes last night, and I caught the second one, "Party Like: A Roman Emperor." I have to give NatGeo credit: I actually kind of like the premise behind the Party Like and it certainly didn't annoy me as much as Doomsday Preppers did.
NatGeo describes Party Like as a series that "goes behind the scenes, past and present, to discover what it takes to put on the biggest, the most excessive, and the most outrageous parties the world has ever known." The episode that I caught cut back and forth between a rager at Las Vegas' Palms Hotel and a party thrown by the teenage Syrian emperor of Rome, Elagabalus.
Unlike A.J. Soprano, I have virtually no interest in party planning, so I pretty much tuned out whenever the modern day stuff came on screen. However I watched enough to learn that it focused on Dylan Marer, a party planner from Los Angeles, and his goal of throwing a pool party for 3,500 guests. Honestly, these parts of "A Roman Emperor" felt awkwardly shoehorned in. The party at the Palms really had nothing whatsoever to do with Rome. In fact, the theme of the Palms' party was "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which if memory serves me correctly was about Athenians, not Romans.
I may have very little interest in modern event planning, but I am fascinated by historical figures. Going in I didn't know much about Elagabalus, so I appreciate that Party Like introduced me to the dude. Unfortunately, the show focused on the more mundane aspects of Roman party planning, so I had to do a little bit of outside research to get the more details about Elagabalus. The most interesting thing I learned about him is most historians believe that Elagabalus was probably a transsexual and he requested that palace doctors give him female genitalia.
Lingering thoughts on "A Roman Emperor":
