"I, Claudius" Returns in a 35th-Anniversary DVD Set Acorn Films John Hurt, left, as Caligula and Derek Jacobi as the title character in "I, Claudius," the 1976 BBC mini-series. THE making of the 1976 BBC mini-series "I, Claudius" was fraught with headaches. The specter of an ill-fated, unfinished 1937 movie version starring Charles Laughton loomed large. At one point the project died when negotiations between the BBC and London Films, which owned the rights to the Laughton effort, broke down. When taping did begin, the actors struggled with everything from their makeup to making sense of their roles as the early rulers of the Roman Empire. But Robert Graves, who wrote the original 1934 novel and its 1935 sequel, "Claudius the God," was unperturbed. "I've communed with Claudius," he said at the time, "and he reassured me that this would be a great success." Indeed it was. First shown in the United States 35 years ago this month, "I, Claudius" pushed the limits of small-screen sex and violence and foreshadowed seamy family dramas like "The Tudors," "The Borgias" and even "The Sopranos." "I, Claudius" also brought to widespread attention several of its stars, notably Derek Jacobi as the stammering, twitching, limping, ostensibly simple-minded title character, who survived decades of murder and intrigue to become the fourth emperor of Rome. "I owe "Claudius" so much on both sides of the Atlantic," Mr. Jacobi said in a telephone interview. If he has haunted me, it's been a beneficent ghost. He even reprised the role for a six-part adaptation on BBC Radio 4 in 2010. The durability of "I, Claudius" began with Graves's books. Cast as the secret memoirs of Claudius himself, they were grounded in exhaustive scholarship but imbued with a novelist's imagination. They had plenty of skulduggery, perversion and other delectable malfeasance, set against the marble majesty of Roman antiquity. The TV version, however, came close to missing the mark. "It was so badly received in its first two weeks," recalled Sian Phillips, who played the empress Livia, "because it was so different." That difference lay in the series's down-to-earth treatment of epic material. Despite its imperial setting "I, Claudius" was a small studio effort devoid of huge sets and sprawling battle scenes. In whittling down Graves's tomes (which total some 1,000 pages in paperback) to a little over 11 hours of television, the scriptwriter Jack Pulman, who died in 1979, effectively rendered them as a soap opera, emphasizing the dysfunctional relations inherent in any extended clan. At various points he called his teleplay a Jewish family comedy and a treatment of a Mafia dynasty. "We agreed right at the beginning that we weren't going to make a period piece," said the director, Herbert Wise, 88. We wanted to make it contemporary. We wanted to make the point that human psychology hasn't changed much in the last 2,000 years. We don't throw people to the tigers anymore, but we still fight. Pulman made the story even more accessible by eschewing the pseudo-classical dialogue that was a feature of innumerable sword-and-sandal films. When the emperor Tiberius (George Baker) brings out Claudius's sister-in-law, Agrippina (Fiona Walker, who would go on to marry Mr. Wise) in chains, he declares, "My dear, you look like a Greek tragedy." "And you look like a Roman farce," she replies. Pulman "was a brilliant adapter," said John Hurt, who played the mad emperor Caligula, "and his literary passion does come off the page. It's immensely playable. You learn it in five minutes. To compensate for the production's physical modesty Mr. Wise urged grand performances - "bold, poster-color acting," as Ms. Phillips put it. "There was certainly a theatricality about it," said Patrick Stewart, who was the treacherous commander of the Praetorian Guard, Aelius Sejanus. Many of the characters were really larger than life.