Queen Cleopatra is the second in Jada Pinkett Smith’s African Queens series of drama-docuseries hybrids; this time the focus is on one of the most famous African queens of them all, Egypt’s Cleopatra. Controversy has surrounded this installment, including objections from Egypt’s own government. Are those objections merited?

Opening Shot: A snake slithers on sandy ground, then we see an eagle. A woman walks towards the camera, and narrator Jada Pinkett Smith intones “Cleopatra, African queen. Mother to a nation of millions. A living, breathing Egyptian goddess, both feared and adored.

The Gist: Cleopatra (Adele James) is part of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and at the tender age of 17, she took over Egypt, along with her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII (Calum Balmforth), when their father, Ptolemy XII (Louis Emerick), died.

In her father’s will, it was decreed that Cleopatra and her brother would rule together, which means that, per Egyptian custom, the two of them were married. But the eunuch Pothinus (Michael Greco), who raised Ptolemy XIII, soon gained too much influence; while Cleopatra was touring Lower Egypt trying to be the “people’s queen,” Pothinus and Ptolemy were plotting to kill or exile her.

Cleopatra’s younger sister Arsinoe (Andira Crichlow) is also unhappy that she has no power, and when she is granted land to rule, she’s given Cyprus. In order to get her throne back, Cleopatra secretly visits Julius Caesar (John Partridge) after Ptolemy XIII and his men kill his son-in-law Pompey (Caesar was chasing Pompey through Egypt after he fought him off in Rome). She offers not only an alliance, but the two of them have an affair, resulting in Cleopatra’s pregnancy, shortly after she took over, her brother died, and Arsinoe was arrested.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As we mentioned, Queen Cleopatra is the same format as African Queens: Njinga, where dramatic sequences are interspersed with expert interviews.

Our Take: The hybrid format is always a puzzler to us, because it doesn’t seem to give enough time to the talking head experts, but it also doesn’t provide the dramatic sequences enough narrative momentum for the audience to get into the story. Overall, there’s never a good balance between the elements.

Queen Cleopatra definitely suffers from this problem, but in a way that’s different than Njinga did. In the first season, the interviews felt like window dressing for the well-acted dramatic scenes. Here, the interviews are the more compelling part, mainly because a lot of the talks go into how the history of Cleopatra is different than how pop culture portrayed her.

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And we’re not just talking about the queen’s skin color. As Professor Shelley P. Haley said, her mother told her that “I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was Black.” In fact, because not much is known about her mother, what she looked like is very much up to debate, as the controversy surrounding the casting of this series has pointed out. It’s definitely a question that needed to be discussed in this series.

However, the more important message that people should get out of this series, though, is that Cleopatra wasn’t the temptress she has been portrayed as in popular culture; she was a strong, intelligent and determined leader who knew what she wanted for herself and her country.

James does a good job of showing that side of Cleopatra. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast play their parts like they’re in something more akin to Caligula than a serious examination of Cleopatra’s life. The dramatic sequences feel more disjointed here than they did in Njinga, and not as well fleshed-out or acted.

Sex and Skin: Cleopatra and Caesar get it on, but we don’t see much.

Parting Shot: We see Arsinoe get on a ship to Rome, where Caesar is supposed to execute her. “That doesn’t happen,” says Haley.

Sleeper Star: Besides Haley, we liked the interview from Dr. Islam Issa, who wrote a book about Alexandria. We especially liked when he talked about how different cultures would picture Cleopatra as reflections of themselves.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I wanted Egypt! Not some small province floating in the see,” Arsinoe says about Cyprus. That’s too bad; we hear Cyprus is a very nice place to live.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Though we liked the experts that were interviewed for Queen Cleopatra, as well as Adele James’ performance as the famous queen, the dramatic sequences leave too much to be desired to keep us from just reading about Cleopatra online to get the information we want.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.