I was at a scholarly panel on the show at the APA conference last week. It was pretty interesting and had a really large crowd (the largest I saw at the whole conference as far as I can remember). A really good paper on Cleopatra and the fan outrage at the way she is depicted. The respondent at the end was way off on a number of things though - talking about how the show cannot be compared with movies with Cleopatra (and other things) since it's clearly just television (no commercials, the channel clearly a movie channel and with their own programming that is made for people who watch HBO and the movies there, BBC cooperation, letterboxing, no really famous actors, and with the surround sound and huge screens so many people have these days I would argue that all her talk about the show as "television" instead of "cinema" was quite off base).