Okay, I will concede that’s not the cleverest headline ever to appear at Agent Bedhead. The perfect title would have been “II, Claudius,” but WordPress’s headline formatting would have rendered it weak and useless. At any rate, it’s true: HBO has teamed up with the BBC production team behind the fairly excellent Rome to create a remake of the 1976 miniseries, one of the most successful projects the Beeb ever made. (They might even be able to use some of the sets from Rome—the ones that survived the fire, anyway.) The project will not follow the scripts from the 1976 version; instead, it will be drawn directly from the two Claudius novels by Robert Graves.

No word yet on the details of this project—writers, cast, production schedule, or anything else. However, since the original production included Derek Jacobi in the title role, along with Siân Phillips, Brian Blessed, Patrick Stewart, John Hurt, and too many other terrific actors to count, a remake of equally high quality would be awesome. I haven’t been this excited since my first sight of Messalina’s boobies made me feel kind of like I was climbing the rope in gym class.