Cleopatra 2525

Following the end of Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, producers Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert went into production on two new shows designed to help fill the syndicated-TV gap those series were leaving behind. The result was Jack of All Trades and Cleopatra 2525, two half-hour shows filmed in New Zealand using much of the same production infrastructure and crew that had worked on Hercules and Xena.

Beginning in January 2000, many stations aired the two shows together as the Back2Back Action Hour. Being a huge Evil Dead fan, I stumbled across the block sometime in early 2000 and was thrilled to discover Bruce Campbell starring in Jack of All Trades. Bruce Campbell doing a goofy swashbuckling adventure series produced by Sam Raimi was an incredibly easy sell for me.

Then there was Cleopatra 2525, which was a bit more bizarre. It featured three attractive women running around a post-apocalyptic underground world while fighting killer machines, along with a villain who seemed to be channeling his own futuristic version of the Joker. It looked cheap, colorful, weird, and completely unlike anything else on television, so naturally, I kept watching, and before long, I found myself loving this goofy little show.

The opening narration probably does the best job of explaining the premise:

Five hundred years into the future, she will enter a world where machines rule the Earth. Mankind has been driven underground and Cleopatra is about to discover there’s no place like home!

The “she” being described is Cleo, an exotic dancer from the early 21st century who is placed into suspended animation following complications from breast augmentation surgery. Yes, that is really how the show begins.

When Cleo wakes up, she discovers that hundreds of years have passed and humanity has been driven underground by enormous flying machines known as Baileys. She soon joins two resistance fighters, Hel and Sarge, who regularly venture toward the surface while battling machines, mutants, and various other threats standing between humanity and its freedom. It is an absurd premise, but Cleopatra 2525 knows exactly what kind of television show it is.

The series relies heavily on the classic fish-out-of-water setup. Cleo is completely unprepared for the world she wakes up in, and during the earliest episodes you sometimes wonder why Hel and Sarge even bother bringing her along. She has no combat experience, little understanding of the technology surrounding her, and spends much of her time reacting to how ridiculous everything has become.

Cleo slowly finds her place within the group and develops from comic relief into an important member of the team. Her connection to the old world also gives the audience someone familiar to follow through all of the futuristic nonsense. As the series progresses, the chemistry between the three women becomes one of the strongest parts of the show.

Jennifer Sky plays Cleo, while the always delightful Gina Torres, years before Firefly and Hannibal, stars as Hel. Victoria Pratt, who would later become familiar to genre fans through shows like Mutant X, plays Sarge, the muscle of the group. Together, they have the kind of chemistry that makes a low-budget genre show much easier to forgive when the effects or scripts don't quite hold up.

Then there is Creegan. Played by Joel Tobeck, Creegan is a deranged, theatrical villain who looks and behaves like someone tossed the Joker into a late-'90s cyberpunk costume department. Tobeck absolutely devours the scenery every time he appears. The character is completely ridiculous, but that makes him a perfect fit for the universe of Cleopatra 2525. In a show already operating several levels above normal camp, Creegan somehow manages to turn the dial even higher.

Visually, the series is exactly what you would expect from a syndicated science-fiction show produced around the turn of the millennium. The CGI is awful. There are flying machines that look like they escaped from an PlayStation cutscene, elaborate underground sets that are clearly being redressed from episode to episode, and plenty of costumes that seem to exist somewhere between cyberpunk, rave culture, and whatever futuristic clothing designers imagined we would be wearing in the year 2525. But that's part of the appeal.

Nobody involved seems to believe they're making 2001: A Space Odyssey. The show embraces its limitations and leans hard into camp. It moves fast, throws strange ideas at the screen, and generally seems more interested in entertaining you than convincing you that its future is remotely plausible.

That attitude was common among syndicated genre television of the era. Shows like Hercules, Xena, Relic Hunter, The Lost World, and countless others weren't trying to compete with prestige television because prestige television, at least in the way we think of it today, barely existed. These shows were colorful, accessible, sometimes ridiculous entertainment designed to grab your attention while channel surfing on a Saturday afternoon for an hour and Cleopatra 2525 fit perfectly into that world.

Another defining part of the show was its theme song, which uses the concept of the 1969's Zager and Evans hit In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus). The original song is a surprisingly bleak meditation on humanity's future, but attaching that idea to a series about a time-displaced exotic dancer fighting robots somehow transforms it into the perfect introduction.

The theme tells you everything you need to know before the episode even starts: this is going to be weird.

Unfortunately, the original Back2Back Action Hour didn't last very long. Jack of All Trades was cancelled after a relatively short run, leaving Cleopatra 2525 to continue on its own. Eventually, the show expanded from roughly 23-minute episodes into a more traditional hour-long television format and I don't think that change helped.

Part of the appeal of the early episodes was how quickly they moved. There wasn't much room for filler. A threat appeared, Cleo made some jokes, Sarge punched somebody, Hel tried to keep everyone focused, something exploded, and twenty minutes later the credits were rolling.

When the episodes became longer, the pacing suffered. Stories that might have worked perfectly well in half an hour suddenly had to support twice the runtime, and some plots began to feel stretched thinner than they needed to be. The series had already taken some time to figure itself out, and the longer format occasionally exposed weaknesses that the brisk half-hour episodes could simply race past.

Cleopatra 2525 was ultimately cancelled after two seasons and only twenty-eight episodes.

Today, it is exactly the sort of television series that seems destined to disappear between the cracks.

It wasn't a massive hit. It doesn't have a giant fandom keeping it alive. The DVDs have gone out of print, and the show rarely seems to appear on major streaming services. Unless you watched syndicated television around 2000 or happen to spend your evenings digging through forgotten genre shows, there's a very good chance you've never even heard of it and that's a shame.

Cleopatra 2525 is not some forgotten masterpiece waiting to be rediscovered. I'm not going to pretend it belongs alongside The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, or Battlestar Galactica. The effects are dated, the writing can be silly, and occasionally the whole thing feels like an excuse to put attractive people in futuristic costumes and have them run around New Zealand sets, but that's also why I like it.

There is something incredibly charming about television that understands exactly what it is and doesn't apologize for it. Cleopatra 2525 is strange, colorful, campy science fiction from an era when syndicated genre television still had a place in the world. It reminds me of a time when you could stumble across something completely unexpected simply because you happened to turn on the television at the right moment. For a weird little show about an exotic dancer waking up in the distant future and fighting flying robots, that's not a bad legacy.