Top 4 Best TV Shows Like Rome (Ranked & Where to Stream)

Neil Jordan’s lavish drama chronicles Rodrigo Borgia's ascension to the papacy through bribery, intimidation, and raw audacity. Jeremy Irons leads with venomous charisma as Pope Alexander VI, turning Vatican corridors into a viper's nest where holy decrees double as extortion rackets. Alongside him, François Arnaud and Holliday Grainger capture the toxic intensity of the Borgia siblings battling rival clans across Renaissance Italy. The series thrives on intimate betrayal, sumptuous production, and cold-blooded tactical maneuvers executed beneath holy vestments. Audiences searching for tv shows like Rome will immediately recognize the poisonous aristocratic marriages, patrician backstabbing, and unchecked lust for power driving every hour.

Bound between two worlds, Saxon-born Uhtred of Bebbanburg spends five seasons fighting for an ancestral birthright stripped away by betrayal. Adapted from Bernard Cornwell’s novels, the drama anchors itself on the volatile friction between pagan Viking invaders and King Alfred’s devout, fragile dream of a unified England. Alexander Dreymon brings feral charm to Uhtred, while David Dawson’s calculating Alfred provides the narrative's intellectual spine. Shield walls are staged as suffocating meat grinders where survival hinges on split-second instincts. Much like Rome, the series masterfully balances macro-level nation-building with the fierce brotherhood of front-line warriors dragged into monarchs' vanity wars.

Steven Knight’s Birmingham crime saga elevates industrial grime into razor-sharp mythology through sheer stylistic swagger. Returning from the trauma of the Great War, Thomas Shelby—played with haunted severity by Cillian Murphy—leverages illegal bookmaking into legitimate industrial and parliamentary dominion. Backed by Helen McCrory’s formidable Polly Gray, the Shelby clan fights rival syndicates, communist agitators, and crown agents across rain-slicked cobblestones. The plotting moves at an unrelenting pace driven by calculated ruthlessness and self-destructive family pride. Fans hunting for tv shows like Rome will find Tommy Shelby's strategic climb mirroring the icy political maneuvers and underworld ties of the ancient capital.

Centuries after a catastrophic virus blinds humanity, Steven Knight constructs an intensely physical frontier where survival relies on scent, sound, and bone-cracking martial arts. Jason Momoa commands the screen as Baba Voss, a remorseful tribal chieftain forced to unleash savage warfare to protect his sighted stepchildren from a fundamentalist, child-hunting monarchy. Sylvia Hoeks delivers an unhinged, unforgettable turn as Queen Kane, ruling over a desperate mountain kingdom with erratic religious fervor. The show excels at grounded melee combat staged with astonishing spatial discipline. It mirrors Rome in its unflinching depiction of royal decadence, religious fanaticism, and violent tribal honor codes.