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.