Her Macedonian roots had spent eight generations in Egypt at the time of her birth, and many of the specifics of her family tree have been lost to the annals of time. This insistence on her whiteness is curious, as much of her lineage (including her mother’s race) is unknown. The biggest buzz about Netflix’s latest comes from casting a Cleopatra with light brown skin and curly hair – it met with uproar from those who insisted that she couldn’t possibly be Black. It’s a deliciously fun drama weighed down by the self-serious need to educate. Executive producer Jada Pinkett Smith delivers the narration with such sombre self-righteousness that it sucks the joy out of the atmosphere. Despite these historians’ impressive credentials, the drama outshines the testimony at every turn.
Netflix’s docudrama Queen Cleopatra tries to have its cake and eat it too: it has all the campy fun of Cleopatra the soap opera in dramatic re-enactments, but intersperses them with straight-faced expertise from academic talking heads. T here’s often a debate about whether real-life subjects are better suited for drama or documentary treatment, the core (but admittedly oversimplified) belief being that documentaries serve primarily to educate while drama serves to entertain.
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