So, last week I missed Bromans because I was in Berlin having an actual holiday.It was an actual holiday with no writing because, last Wednesday, I sent my editor Scott the first draft of the book! So now I am in the terrified waiting period of hoping that it's ok and how much needs to be burnt. On the upside, I got 5 days with no writing to do.
And now I'm back in Belfast and got to watch Bromans last night. And it's still bizarrely charming.
Bromans has absolutely no right to be charming. It seems to be specifically designed to produce low key moralising outrage and tittilation in equal measure. That's why the majority of the talking head clips with the couples are them not knowing things. One girl, for example, asks the other how Romans cooked eggs without pans. Another responds that the Romans invented the pan. At another point in the show, Summer (19) and Glenn (22) attempt to work out who Maid Marion was. Some of this happens while the girls are making plaster casts of their boobs or butts, which their boyfriends will then try to identify. Thick girls with their tits out is basically pure Daily Mail bait. Add in the boys with regional accents whose main purpose is to be strong and you can hear Outraged of Tumbridge Wells composing their letters about the decline of Western Civilisation from here.
What makes the show charming though is how cute the couples are. The vast majority of them look at each other with a pure love and joy that melts the heart. When the boys all correctly identified the plaster casts of their girlfriend's body parts, it was simultaneously quite weird and quite lovely how well they knew each other. And they all care about each other and about doing well in such a genuine way that I can't help but like them and root for them. Except Dino and Cherelle, who would definitely murder and eat all the others at the slightest provocation.
Anyway, Bromans now has its structure: First, the boys do some circuit training in the North African sun while David McIntosh in pants shouts at them and the girls sunbathe. At the end of the training, McIntosh decides which two put the most effort in and therefore won. Then the girls do a "cultural activity" - making casts of their boobs this week which exists purely to cause drama. Finally, the girls and boys do a challenge together. This week, the couples were tied to revolving platforms and the boys had to use slingshots to hit their opponents with projectiles while the girls span the platform to keep their boy out of the firing line. It was bizarre. The eimination process is excessively complicated. First, the mysterious emperor decides who will be up for elimination, based on advice from McIntosh and Dominus, then the nominated boys make a speech asking to be saved and finally the rest of the couples choose who gets to stay. Then, apparently, the emperor overrides their decision and no one leaves. Because absolute monarchy is capricious and inscrutable.
This whole setup means that the boys and girls both get to do challenges, but only the boy's challenges count towards anything. The girls' challenges are time-fillers. The girls' most important role in the whole thing is to support and spur on their boyfriends. They give the boys something more than themselves to fight for, they demand that the boys strive to please them, to increase their standing among the other girls, to get them rewards. The boys have to report their progress - their successes and failures - to their girlfriends, who then shout at them to do better. It's absolutely the most Roman thing I've ever seen. Not gladiators, who were slaves who couldn't marry, but for free Roman citizens, this is oddly accurate.
There's two very Roman concepts on display here: The notion that the individual is working to build prestige and wealth for a family rather than for themselves, and that women couldn't technically impact the outcomes of the constant competition for power and wealth in public. Women (legally) had to rely on men doing well in politics and war (if they were of senatorial rank) and business (if they were freedmen or equestians) and could only offer advice and support. Obviously, in the real world, real Roman women had more access and agency than the Bromans girls do, but as a very broad framework it's disturbingly accurate. The men go out to work and fight and come home to their women, who tell them off or celebrate; the women's reactions fuel the men's drive to succeed; the women's prestige depends almost entirely on the men's success. Nothing could be more Roman.
The interesting thing in this is how it serves to highlight gender divisions and make them really, really stark. Obviously, the Bromans producers have deliberately chosen couples who embody extreme gender presentation: the men are hypermasculine with huge shiney muscles and enormous strength; the women are hyperfeminine with long hair extensions, plumped lips, massive eyelashes and several sets of fake boobs between them. The structure of the show emphasises this by forcing the women to be passive and supportive, while the men are forced to engage in feats of strength. Apart from the engaging in feats of strength (which Roman men of the higher classes would consider to be barbaric), this extreme division between masculinity and femininity, this bludgeoning unsubtlety, is something the Romans would approve of.
Eventually, in episode three, no one got sent home for reasons that were entirely unclear but which entirely messed up a lot of couple alliances but there were two true winners in my heart.
The first was Jordan, who wrote a poem for his gf Jade (who likes poetry and music according to Jordan) and then read it to her. The poem was a set of rhyming couplets, each using a different synonym for penis, begging Jade to shag him on set. Writing a poem to a girl in a rigid form begging for a shag is SPECTACULARLY Roman. The only way it could be more Roman would be if the next poem was hendecasyllabic and about how much he hated Jade now.
The second winner was Summer, for declaring, during a massage she got as a reward for Glenn winning the first challenge, that being a Roman wife was much more interesting than being a contract administrator. This is such a brilliantly obvious statement (because being a contract administrator sounds UNBEARABLE. I'm sorry if you're a contract administrator) that I love it.
So that's Bromans! Here's some Catullus to see us out.