Genius of the Ancient World

Ridiculously incorrect it portraying ideas of these great thinkers. Annoying clip style filming where the camera can't show something longer than 5 seconds.

The first episode is basically footage taken from a movie interspersed with a talking head visiting a few random historical sites and filler places

In the second episode the narrator tells us that we need to see Egypt from space in order to understand. You'd think we would see Egypt from space, right? Wrong. We see a talking head blabber on and then randomly jump to a conclusion. The story progression reminds me of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle

This is hard to watch. It is Hollywood crap. Make a story overly complicated and unfocused and pass it off as grand. This series is nothing but filler

Watched the episode on Buddha and found it thoroughly unenlightening. The Western mind is steeped in the notion of breakthrough conceptual thinking, so Buddha's story is presented in that framework, completely disregarding the various soteriological philosophies and paths of India that pre-date Buddhism and intimately informed and influenced its development. Brahminism is the usual villain, reduced to priests performing rituals, as if that's all to Hinduism, as if before Buddha there were no methods and teaching for liberation, as if the Upanishads, Brahma Sutras etc did not exist. It is clear the presenter neither understands Hinduism nor Buddhism, else she would have known that the paths of Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism are similar to the extent of being almost same, differing only in the ultimate nature of Brahman/Nothingness. The multi-layered story of Buddhism is dumbed down to an extent that may have been forgiven for a movie maker, but not for a historian. Those who really want to learn about the history and development of Buddhism and comparative with Hinduism should go to serious scholars like Edward Conze, Anand Coomaraswamy, Ram Swarup etc rather than waste time with a bogus history and historian here.

In trying to show buddhas journey,dint understand why they kept showing Indian poverty, found no connection of that with the story and that has not been done for Socrates or Confucius.

If wanting to show the country, show the good and bad, India is only shown in bad light.If wanting to show suffering, show for all countries.

Buddha and Confucius episode are low on information

Western audience need to ask for better informative documentaries or drama if you will. If the producers continue to harp on the cliched narrative of cast hierarchy and fancy the roamance of Indian proverty sadly it would be the audience which will be the loser.

Bettany falls for the same cliched beaten down path nothing much to offer in terms of content but a clever effort to hide that incompetence behind the colorful india.