The creators and their second-tier pay network, then, seem to be doubling down on that man-child demographic-and so telling everyone else to get lost, go read a book or something.īut hope lives for these viewers. What happens next cannot have ever happened on TV before: the worst, dullest characters on a show rising up, as a class, and slaughtering the show’s best and most engaging characters. With all the upper-class friends of Batiatus and Lucretia present upstairs, Spartacus persuades Crixus to join him in revolt.
The Starz series about him fulfills this obligation in a metatextual bloodbath. History requires Spartacus to start a slave rebellion in the ludus. It’s going to use a certain relentless “intensity of … content” to “suggest” to you that you’re getting “an authentic representation” of a period you’re probably ignorant about anyway, so who’s going to know the difference? It warns you not about what the show will portray for you of ancient Rome, but what it intends to do, to you, the viewer. But note the kicker: “he intensity of the content is to suggest an authentic representation of that period.” This is a brazenly postmodern formulation. The show is a historical portrayal of ancient Roman society and the intensity of the content is to suggest an authentic representation of that period.Ĭasual listeners might hear the phrases “extreme … brutality,” “historical portrayal of Ancient Roman society,” and “authentic representation” and think they’re being readied for some fearless realism, history as it truly was in all its cruelty and toplessness. Spartacus depicts extreme sensuality, brutality and language that some viewers may find objectionable. It’s bloody stuff, maybe the goriest violence ever filmed for television, but you can’t say nobody warned you, because every show opens with a disclaimer:
He’s played now by a Welsh actor named Andy Whitfield, * and Season 1 tracks his enslavement in Thrace through his gladiatorial victories in provincial Capua. This is what combat looks like in Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which presents the same rebellious gladiator that Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas gave the world in 1960.