Agreed. But they miss out on the fact that Commodus usually fought injured men with bad swords. He thought he was literally the reincarnation of Hercules. Every time he entered Vespasian’s great arena he came in dressed as Hercules and would fight injured gladiators with weak swords. Just a cruel show and every fight was rigged. Gladiators were below prostitutes in Roman society. A truly embarrassing spectacle for Rome to endure. Kind of like Biden but exponentially worse.
Commodus was the first Emperor that was actually the genetic son of a Roman emperor, and the son of one of the greatest thinkers and emperors, the philosopher emperor, Marcus Aurelius.
Paradoxical that the son of such a great man as Marcus Aurelius was such a loser. But he is a sympathetic character because he lived in pit of vipers which in my assessment drove him mad. But he didn’t have far to drive. A lazy, Hunter Biden type in reality. He’s not really portrayed that way in the series mentioned.
But it is certainly entertaining like the movie Gladiator which is just all over the place or Vikings which compresses about 300 years into 30. It’s entertainment but not very deep into the reality as we understand it from contemporaries to these events.
The show did reveal that Commodus was cheating by having the swords of his opponents dulled and made weak so they would break. It was covered in a lot of detail.
It characterized Commodus as a blood thirsty, crazed lunatic.
It showed him to be a lazy, no-account, shiftless, lay-about from an early age. Marcus Aurelius tried to turn him into a man in the wars in Germanic, but by then it was too late.