The acting was bad, the CGI effects and sets were just terrible and if anything, it seemed even more boring than the books. On the positive side, I understood everything they were saying.

The "Dallas/Dynasty" comparison is a good one, at least for the TV series. I think the books were perhaps a tad better, but not by much. On balance, I wish I had read something better. However, now that I have a gazillion books in French (that's a precise number), I will pick something better next time. I even bought the Boris Vian Pléiade books at your suggestion (it was a two-volume set), so I certainly have plenty of options. I might read Huysmans or Rimbaud or Baudelaire next, or even just go and read some Dumas while my recollection of Druon is fresh. I might also read something older, like Molière or Voltaire.

One thing that I wish I had written down when I came across them were the seemingly anachronistic statements. It seemed to me there were numerous occasions where Druon used a word or phrase in the course of a dialogue that would not have been invented at that time (sort of like having Romans talk about selling someone down the river, for example) but I couldn't be sure. It was also clumsy the way he sometimes used archaic forms of words (like "les Anglois" or moult) for no apparent reason after having used the modern form for a long time. A few times it was probably because he was quoting a historical document, but the rest of the time it made no sense. If he had just written it in Medieval French or Modern French and stuck to it, it would have made more sense.

I found the historical footnotes highly misleading, because they implied that the rest of the statements without footnotes had a historical basis as well. I can imagine that Druon has caused a great deal of people to make errors about French history in much the same way that some of the less intelligent readers of Dan Brown think the Da Vinci Code is based on fact.

Either way, despite my ongoing loathing of the French publishing industry for not being able to find books in hardcover very easily (though, to date, I've found almost everything I wanted to buy in hardcover other than Hugo's Quatrevingt-treize and Dumas' Le Vicomte de Bragelonne), I can see why no one would publish Druon in hardcover after the first run. The books just aren't worth it.