Spartacus: Blood and Sand

Bursting onto the scene in 2010 as part of the cultural aftershock of 300, Spartacus: Blood and Sand clearly stands as the pulpiest show ever released on any kind of TV. Produced by Steven DeKnight (a veteran of shows like Buffy, Angel and Dollhouse) the first season went off like a bomb, as nobody had ever seen anything quite this carnal, bloody, and excessive. Taking the well-known story of the leader of the so-called Third Servile War in 73-71 BCE, the show amped everything up to 11 and made a bloody, melodramatic epic for a modern audience.

One of the things that makes the story of Spartacus so popular to rework is that there is not a whole lot of solid information about him. We know he was Thracian (from somewhere in what is now Eastern Europe) and that he was a gladiator. We can tell from his success as a general that he had some military experience and was an excellent tactician. We know he led the largest slave uprising in Roman history, and we know when he died. That’s about it.

The first season of the show stars Andy Whitfield as the titular character, and shows us how he became a slave in the first place and how he ended up in a ludus in Italy, sentenced to be a gladiator. Since we don’t know anything factual about this part of his life, the show is free to invent whatever it wants, and does so. It fills in other named members of the revolt, and adds to them with characters both historical and imaginary.

The first smart thing the show did was reimagine the gladiator school as a hothouse for melodrama, putting in rivalries, jealousies, affairs, hatreds, friendships and betrayals galore. Every character is caught up in multiple different plotlines where they are pulled in different directions, trying to reach their personal ambitions for power, freedom, wealth, or love, all against the backdrop of the brutality and violence of the system of slavery and combat they were caught up in.

Brutality was the other thing the show did right, as they elected to not sugar-coat anything, and in fact did whatever you would call the opposite of that. While shows like Rome strove for historical accuracy, Spartacus went way beyond that into sheer pulp sex and violence. Rather than show tasteful nudity, Blood and Sand was almost wall-to-wall naked flesh and sex so explicit it is still kind of shocking. There was none of this “necessary to the plot” bullshit, and plenty of the nudity and sex was just there to add to the debauched atmosphere. It helped to create a feeling that anything was possible, and you were never sure what the show would do or how far they would go.

And showing most clearly the influence of 300 on the whole idea, the violence in Spartacus was cranked way past anything believable, with plenty of slow-motion and lots of bright, color-corrected blood everywhere. With the saturated digital color, the action scenes are gripping festivals of screaming, hyper-real carnage featuring ripped flesh, severed limbs, and literal buckets of gore.

None of this would work at all if you didn’t have a cast willing to go for it, and the cast of this show really rose to the occasion. Andy Whitfield stars as the hero, but he is almost eclipsed by the rest of the crew, including Manu Bennett hamming it up as Crixus, Nick Tarabay as the serpentine, treacherous Ashur, Peter Mensah as the whip-cracking trainer Doctore, and John Hannah as the cussing, murderous, amoral owner of the ludus, Batiatus. One has to single out Lucy Lawless for bringing a ton of complexity and depth to her role as Lucretia, and at the same time she doesn’t shrink from the sexuality of the role. Everybody here just goes all-out.

Each subsequent season of the show had a different title, and it maybe never recovered entirely from the death of Andy Whitfield in 2011, which necessitated the recasting of the central character with Liam McIntyre. As it moved more into the history of the revolt, the show became less inventive and more a tragedy, which is tonally quite different. The first season stands apart for these and other reasons, though they were all solidly made.

With it’s intense sexuality, gory violence, and overheated melodrama, Spartacus: Blood and Sand is an almost pure pulp entertainment, and that puts it squarely in the wheelhouse of Sword & Sorcery. Adventure writers have spilled oceans of ink over the Roman Empire, and the gladiatorial arena still exercises an enduring fascination even today. Hell, the movies made Conan a gladiator when he never was in Howard’s stories, just because gladiators are so cool. With maybe an undead wizard as the villain instead of a Roman consul, this would be right on target.