Mehmed the Conqueror (1432-1481) was quite possibly one of the most accomplished people to have ever walked the face of the earth. He first became Sultan of the Ottoman Empire at 12 years old, and conquered the city of Constantinople (now Istanbul) at the age of 21, thus ending the Roman Empire after nearly 2,000 years of existence. He conquered much of the Balkans, even going up against the infamous Vlad the Impaler. To put it mildly, he was nothing short of a legend.
Why, then, was a show based on his life doomed from the very start?
(Spoilers, I guess, for 600-year-old history and a frankly pretty shabby Netflix docudrama based on it).
“Rise of Empires: Ottoman” is a Netflix series produced in Turkey, but filmed in English for (presumably) an Anglophone audience. The first season, made up of six 45-minute episodes, deals with the conquest of Constantinople, one of the most important events in medieval history. The narrative switches back and forth between the viciously determined Ottomans, led by Mehmed (Cem Yiğit Üzümoğlu), and the desperate Romans, led by Constantine XI (Tommaso Basili). Filled with epic battles, sweeping history, and larger-than-life characters, it should be interesting, and yet …
It’s just boring.
Simply put, a singular battle is not enough to fill 270 minutes of television. At least, not this battle. Constantinople had been conquered before by more stupider foes (see: the Fourth Crusade), and by the time Mehmed came along, the once-great Roman Empire had shrunk to encompass just a single city. On the other hand, the Ottomans already controlled much of modern-day western Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria. In order to distract the viewer from the clearly forgone conclusion, the show is bloated with clumsily-written invented subplots and a frankly ridiculous amount of flashbacks, which I’d estimate make up around one-third of the total runtime.
Perhaps if the show had embraced the futility of the Roman struggle and committed itself to telling a tragic tale of resistance against conquest, it could have had some artistic merit. But at the end of the day, it insists on having its true protagonist be Mehmed: a man who, despite the numerous flashbacks attempting to explain it away via daddy issues, simply wished to conquer for conquering’s sake, helped along by the power of religious fanaticism. The conflict is so clearly black-and-white that the show must omit several Ottoman atrocities (such as the three-day sack of the city after its fall) to make it seem at all “balanced.” Without even giving the chance for the Ottomans to be interesting and hateable villains, they just come off as dull heroes.
The second season, dubbed “Vlad vs. Mehmed,” is at least working with richer source material … in theory. Once again, many flashbacks are employed, this time to build up the childhood friendship between Mehmed and Vlad (played by Daniel Nuță, who looks suspiciously like Nandor the Relentless from “What We Do In The Shadows”), who grew up as a hostage in the Ottoman court. Their conflict as adults, wherein Vlad attempts to wrest his native Wallachia out of Ottoman control via several crimes against humanity, therefore has an emotional charge to it that season one did not have. But all such a promising premise leads to is an immensely unsatisfying ending.
Being a docudrama, the show can occasionally ignore history, but it can’t completely rewrite it. And historically, Mehmed never actually finished the campaign against Vlad himself. He had better things to do, so once he had mostly won, he handed the reins over to his ally/lover (though the latter trait is, of course, never depicted in the show, not even subtextually), Radu (Ali Gözüşirin), who was also Vlad’s little brother. All this means is that the show spends five and a half episodes building up an epic, emotionally-charged rivalry only for Mehmed to abandon it for reasons that seem completely out-of-character for how he is characterized up to that point.
There are other overarching issues with the show, of course. The show is only superficially historically accurate, often ignoring its own lore for the sake of an unearned dramatic moment, with actors suffering from acute cases of “iPhone face”, prancing around in costumes that look straight out of a budget version of “Game of Thrones”. The writing is overly stilted and self-important and character motivations are inconsistent at best. (There is one scene that ends with Mehmed credibly accusing Radu of being a spy, only for them to seemingly be back on good terms in the following scene with no explanation as to why.) The docudrama format is used as a crutch, wherein historians merely inform the audience how cool and smart the characters are without it ever being shown. Oftentimes, the writing was so stupid, I was left wondering how any of these characters could have accomplished any of the things they historically did.
But the show’s most fatal flaw was ultimately a conceptual one, present in the very premise it had to offer. Simply put, Mehmed the Conqueror was not the right protagonist through which either of these stories should have been told. While interesting in his own right, his comparative lack of emotional ties to the plot meant that, in any given scene, he was usually the least interesting character. I found myself longing for a Constantine or Radu show; a show with higher emotional stakes centered around lesser-known historical figures, where Mehmed could simply shine as a compelling villain or side character. But such a show wouldn’t have the same recognizable name to draw in viewers, nor would it have been as positive a portrayal of Turkish history and national identity. As such, it was conceived as the Mehmed show, and as such, it was doomed to dullness.
