I recently watched Pompeii: Out of Time (2026) hosted by Tom Hiddleston, and it’s left me with some BIG feelings about the line between a documentary and completely made-up bullshit. The premise behind the series is our buddy Tom has this intense fascination with the Roman city of Pompeii and its destruction during the A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius and he just wants so badly to explore what the last moments of the city may have been like for the citizens. He explains his personal attachment to Pompeii happened in the mid-90s when he was on a gap year from school and decided to travel to Italy, whereupon he visited the ruins of Pompeii and was forever captivated by the tragedy that unfolded there almost 2,000 years ago, so when he had the opportunity to help create a show about it for National Geographic (owned by Disney, natch), he leapt at the chance. So we get a handful of experts trotted out to chat about What Life Was Like in the Year 79 while Tom imagines a bunch of characters based on some very thin archeological evidence, the scene fades, and we see these characters come to life.
The thing is, while the experts are more or less there to prop up Hiddleston’s dramatic interpretation of the death and destruction awaiting the denizens of Pompeii (with a brief, “Oh yeah, and Herculaneum” tossed in there), the reality is that the entire show is less about how research can inform creative storytelling and more an example of exactly why Hollywood sucks so bad at presenting facts. Multiple times throughout the episodes Tom is lightly chided by some scholar for “getting ahead of himself” based on the thinnest of historical context, but he just plows on anyway with his “vision” of how these largely fictional characters would have experienced the last day of their lives. Which would be FINE in the context of a fictionalized film, but these flights of fancy are being presented as facts from trusted sources, scholarly research, and NatGeo itself. If Tom Hiddleston wanted to dramatize the destruction of Pompeii, he should have produced a miniseries or film or something, and sure, I’d probably still be over here on this blog typing furiously about historical inaccuracies, but at least there would be no confusion about conflating research with made up nonsense.
So, ok, what about the costumes? Well, in a shocking turn of events, I thought they were very good! Way better than they deserved to be, in fact! Costume designer Cecile Van Dijk worked on productions such as The Phantom Thread, Bridgerton, and The Great. Considering the wealth of information that we have about what Romans were wearing in Pompeii, it looks as if Van Dijk did her homework, and there aren’t a lot of obvious Hollywoodisms in the clothing. The mural and fresco artwork preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius gives us a pretty clear view of how these Romans looked, dressed, partied, and otherwise spent their lives.
Unfortunately, because I couldn’t log into my Disney+ account on my computer to do any screen grabs, I had to rely on what images from the show have been posted online thus far, and well … it’s not much and the majority is of the post-disaster scenes where everyone is in tattered, dirty, and bloody clothing.
Did you watch Pompeii: Out of Time (2026)? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Find this frock flick at:
I enjoyed it but to your point, I mostly treated it as a docudrama with some comedic bits (Hiddleston and the experts) and some loose connections to the actual history.
What I really appreciated though was the colours since too often Ancient Greece and Rome are presented as a) muddy or b) shades of white, so I quite enjoyed that the characters – regardless of status – wore a number of bright colours (barring the Praetorian but he was a military man so I give that a pass) and the level of attention paid to things like jewelry and hair.
I haven’t watched it, nor do I plan to, but I’m pleased they at least used color in this series.
I appreciate the use of color and especially the head covering/ hair dressing! Better than that shit show Pompeii in 2014!
I’ve never seen a tunic(?) like Amalthea’s. The way it kind of balloons on the side like it has pockets. It’s a really lovely look.
I think that’s a really voluminous palla in the same color as the stola that’s tucked into a belt at the sides. I’ve seen friends who do Roman costumes end up with a similar look, but usually it’s done with a contrasting color.
I can’t comment on that program, per se, and from what you say I don’t think I would like it; however, on YouTube you can find him chatting to Professor Mary Beard (who is wonderful!) and Charlotte Higgins. It’s much more interesting than all the bells and whistles could ever be.
Yes, Disney+, sometimes less really IS more!
The podcast is called “Instant Classics”
I was going to recommend this episode. Tom geeking out with Mary Beard? More, please.
I watched a bit of it, but really, meh. The BBC did a three-part documentary on the new discoveries last year, probably on Britbox. And in other good news, they’re repeating Mary Beard’s fantastic series on the Romans. She really knows her stuff, and she doesn’t bother with all that re-enactment nonsense.
I was able to tolerate about 15 minutes before I stopped watching. I do appreciate Hiddleston in “Loki” but this was too much him and not enough actual history. I saw Dr. Darius Arya was a participant, and I wanted to do his summer program in the past. I had the same problem with this as I had with Starz “Men in Kilts” – fan service. I’ll watch repeats of Mary Beard in the future.
I’ll save you the time; Dr. Arya had probably the smallest part of all the experts since he was focused on Herculaneum and ‘The Praetorian’ (one of the three real life Romans the show follows to find out if they survived or not), which had the lesser amount of screentime compared to Pompeii and the other two Roman characters.
My wife and I loved it. We like historical fiction and we recognize that without direct documentation but only fragmentary evidence, the best you can do is provide a plausible scaffolding for a story that you can overlay, in lieu of hard evidence. We do this all the time and it was a well done historia drama documentary rather than a dry retelling of the date and time and that everyone was smothered and buried, which was already told many times.
There were undoubtedly survivors, or maybe refugees is a better word, who fled Pompeii before all hell broke loose but the only rescue attempt we know of, Pliny the Elder’s, not only failed to rescue anybody but resulted in Pliny’s death. The same deal with Herculaneum, the population seems to have tried to escape by sea. We know not all made it but many may have.
The terror and the trauma of people caught on the periphery of the eruption is ably recorded by Pliny the Younger.