‘Alexander: The Making Of A God’ Is Netflix’s Latest Horny History Lesson

Twenty years ago this fall, Oliver Stone reached an unintentional crossroads in his career as a big-studio director when he made Alexander, his passion-project epic about the life of Alexander the Great, played by Colin Farrell. The movie’s subsequent flop took some heat out of both careers, and only Farrell fully recovered. This wouldn’t be the last time Stone was afforded big-studio money to make one of his stylish riffs in history, but it was more or less the beginning of the end.

These days, directors are still occasionally afforded the opportunity to make a lavish historical epic – Apple just spent a bunch of money on Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, after all – but Netflix has discovered a presumably more cost-effective way of telling these stories without making something especially cheap-looking. Alexander: The Making of a God is their most recent foray into a particular style of docudrama, following series like Troy: Fall of a City (which has its own two-decade-old Hollywood equivalent) or Roman Empire: Caligula: The Mad Emperor. The pieces of these shows are familiar: Documentary-style talking heads from various experts plus re-enactments featuring actors, sets, and so on, dramatizing mini-scenes, with these two methods of conveying information complementing each other, easing each other’s burden. The historians don’t have to piece together the entire narrative themselves, but the dramatizations don’t need all the (expensive) connective tissue of a 160-minute epic.

Broken down into 40-minute chunks reminiscent of the cable programming that Netflix increasingly resembles these days, these docu-series are clear comfort watches, perfect for background-watching, before-bed watching, co-watching with your phone, or even, if you prefer, commanding full, rapt attention. Think of it as an historical epic that just outright admits you might fall asleep during it, and assures you that it’s not a big deal; you can pick it up again tomorrow, or whenever.

It’s an appealing prospect that nonetheless had me wondering if misbegotten Hollywood historical epics were getting kind of a bad rap. Stone’s Alexander isn’t especially good, give or take your interest in admittedly attractive elements such as Rosario Dawson, Colin Farrell, and war elephants, but it at least springs from a filmmaker’s point of view (however addled Stone was beginning to seem in 2004). It forces decisions to be made in a way that these more consensus-driven Netflix series seem to actively avoid.

Take Alexander’s sexuality, which is dealt with – in a manner, anyway – almost immediately in the first episode of Making of a God. Mixed with historians discussing the nature of relationships in ancient Greek society is a sexy, tender makeout scene between Alexander and his close friend Hephaestion, driving home the point that the two may have been lovers (though this is not certain), and that the Greeks didn’t have the same differentiation between heterosexual and homosexual affairs that later societies have fixated on. It’s an interesting point, and it’s certainly the good kind of startling to realize that we’re now in a place where a couple of guys passionately kissing isn’t considered too spicy for a middle-of-the-road super-mainstream docu-series. (Then again, maybe any perceived spiciness is part of the point.)

But maybe the show is so casual about it because it can afford to be. There’s no real pressure to weave this potential aspect of Alexander’s life into the broader narrative, or even commit to the idea that it was definitely there, or even (paradoxically) commit to the ambiguity. This doesn’t necessarily need to become a crucial part of Hephaestion’s “character.” Their relationship can exist more or less in a vacuum, as an aesthetically pleasing footnote. That’s true of many of the show’s re-enactment scenes, which are way above-average for that sort of thing in terms of production value, but by design don’t have the command of a committed performance.

Stranger, it seems possible that this style could bleed into fiction features. Ava DuVernay’s recent film Origin explores the writing of the bestselling nonfiction book Caste by fusing the author’s life and some of the historical stories of prejudice and injustice she encounters while writing her book. Though they have their effective moments, many of the historical segments have re-enactment energy – that noncommittal air of illustration that hangs over classroom-ready materials that don’t really cohere into works of art. Watching Netflix’s Alexander and thinking of Origin helped me realize why the latter didn’t ultimately work for me.

Of course, Alexander: The Making of a God isn’t necessarily aiming for art. It’s aiming for lightly educational entertainment, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s something amiss about a docu-series that can make me pine, however briefly, for Oliver Stone.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.