Spartacus: The Greatest Show I will never get you to watch

An excessive and overly-sincere retrospective

Content Warning: This post contains quite a few pictures of stylised blood, some nudity, and a lot of ridiculous swearing. If you’re at work, first: thank you for your essential service in these hard times, and second: maybe wait until you get home.

On first dates and at parties and at the end of bookclubs for the last decade(or at least before all the Coronavirus and poor decision making), the default-space-filler-question-du-jour is  ‘So, been binging any good tv lately?’

Simple. Straightforward. And to me, infuriating.

Because I know my answer, I always know it, and I know YOU WON’T GET IT.

In June 2010, I was in my first year of Uni, Avatar was still showing in cinemas across the globe, and Christchurch was still standing. I finally had a laptop that could go more than 30 minutes without overheating, and with my brothers assistance, I was getting into watching far too much TV.

My brothers download tastes and mine were very different-I wanted anime, he wanted MMA- but we found one show we both adored, probably thanks to all the tits and blood.

And Christ, there was a lot of tits and blood.

Spartacus was created by Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Steven DeKnight, and ran for three main seasons plus a prequel mini-season. Set in 73-71 BC, Spartacus tells the story of an unnamed Thracian, betrayed by Romans, given the name Spartacus and sold to a Gladiator training school. The show tracks his rise from slave to Champion of the arena to fledging rebellion leader to Commander of an army of freed slaves defying an empire.

It’s full of gratuitous blood, gratuitous nudity, gratuitous violence, gratuitous sex, gratuitous swearing, and all around, is not a show for those with delicate sensibilities.

It’s GREAT.

I first watched Spartacus when I was 18, pretty horny, and still awkward and repressed enough that Spartacus seemed like a REVELATION- everyone was banging on about The Wire, but here was MY grown up drama! (lol.)

I eagerly showed it to my friends, who were a mixture of bemused and grossed the hell out. ‘It gets really good later!’ I could have said, but I think in my heart of hearts, I knew from the second my friends didn’t give me the rapturous response I hoped for, that recommending this glorious clusterfuck of a show would be an uphill battle.

AND HOW.

Before I go any further, I should acknowledge that Spartacus has some problematic shit. There’s very upsetting violence and gore, sexual violence, a lot of profanity and nudity and torture and misogynistic language. If Game of Thrones wasn’t your cup of tea, then this probably isn’t either. That’s fine. But if you stuck around after the Red Wedding for the ‘plot’, this might be for you!

The first thing to understand is that Spartacus was a show of grand ambitions and a budget that simply couldn’t match them. This was pre-Game of Thrones and Amazon’s Lord of the Rings deal. This was only a few years after HBO’s Rome had been cancelled for being too expensive. With the limited resources available to them, the producers were never going to pull off anything too realistic…so they didn’t even try. Instead, they took the path of ridiculous stylized cinematography with spurts of fake blood that could drown Peter Jackson, elaborate slow-mo, action that relied on beautiful people being good at stunts and fight choreography rather than hordes of CG enemies thrown against each other like action figures in a washing machine.

As long as gore didn’t upset you, Spartacus was an immersive treat for the eyes. The actors were all stunning, the Romans decked out in luxurious wigs and gowns, the gladiators in leather, armor and dirt….when they were wearing anything at all. Sure, the backgrounds beyond the immediate sets were a little plastic, but between the sex and the swordfights and, you didn’t care. Spartacus could suck you into a constructed world like few other shows could.

Spartacus was fully committed to its own universe. This was a show in which people argued in extended metaphors, and switched from Shakespeare to swearing in every other sentence. It was bizarre, but Jupiter’s Cock, was it immersive.

‘Their army stands an ocean…’

‘As when Crixus was swept from the shores of the living.’

‘They but offer opportunity, to swim in a sea of Roman blood.’

(Superb extended metaphors, the writers all got NCEA level 2 English with Excellence)

Spartacus was financed by a US network, but it was made in New Zealand, with Kiwi (and Australian) actors playing most of the roles, and in between the somewhat incongruous New Zealand accents and the scrappy, determined production values, I felt a sense of great national pride watching Lucy Lawless scheme to advance her political power and also fuck all the hot gladiators she could. This was ours. This was mine.

(Note: due to a lack of available talent in NZ at the time of production, at one point Spartacus was offering $1000 a day for background extras who were willing to get naked. I seriously considered.)

If none of what I’ve mentioned sounds at all appealing to you, I’ve already lost you. You will never watch Spartacus. I’m very sorry.

If you’re intrigued by the idea of hot people fighting and fucking and scheming, but you’re one of those sophisticated fuckers who wants to know the story, the character arcs, what it says about the human condition, WELL. Hold on.

Spartacus clearly revels in the world it has created. It’s gaudy, gory, gross, other terms starting with ‘g’…but my god, did the writers know how to pull off a character arc. They were masters at weaponising carthasis. And with three seasons plus a prequel, they pulled off one of the most affecting series finales ever put to screen.

1.CHARACTER GROOOOWTTTTHHHHH

Okay, if I start describing my favourite character arcs in Spartacus we will be here forever, because they all are, they are all my favourite, so here’s two I like a lot.

AGRON

Agron is one of Spartacus’ numerous queer characters, although the fact that he’s queer isn’t the crux of his character (he also swears more than anyone else in the show, which is an achievement).

He starts out as a gladiator trainee along with Spartacus in season one, and he’s only looking out for himself and his brother, but grows to become a trusted confidant, seasoned general and loving partner to his bf Nasir(his heart will never beat for another).

(best couple in the series, and that is saying something)

And it takes seasons! Agron starts out self-serving and jealous, and there are consequences for his bad behaviour, and he changes! He addresses the fact that he’s being pretty possessive of Nasir, and works to change it, he comes to respect Spartacus as a leader and chooses to stand beside him even against his own countrymen. It would have been so goddamn easy for him to have been written as a two-dimensional revenge obsessed BadAssTM, but because this is a show equally as concerned with people as it is with action, he gets to grow.

NAEVIA

When the series began, Naevia was the character with perhaps the least agency in the whole show. It made sense in the narrative- she was a body slave, trained to serve household tasks (up to and including jerking off her owners), to be traded between Roman aristocrats at the pleasure of her masters, to stand around submissively waiting for an order. She’s helpless, in all ways.

At first.

So much of Naevia’s growth as a character is tied to important story beats, which I desperately don’t want to spoil. CLIFFNOTES: she goes after what she wants, suffers, deals with trauma, fights her way out of it, takes initiative in learning to defend herself, gets revenge, grows in confidence and power until she is an INDOMITABLE REBEL LEADER AND WARRIOR QUEEN, with an extremely supportive feminist partner who respects the hell outta her.

 (ladies, get you a guy who doesn’t promise to behead all your enemies, but promises to teach you how to do it yourself so you don’t have to rely on others to fight for you)

2. CARTHARSIS

Okay, so, there was this one really douchey character called Ashur, right? He was a former gladiator seething with jealousy, constantly scheming and generally being a giant douche. Terrible guy. Hate him. But I understood him. The prequel series(produced when the show was in limbo about the future, as they were going to need to recast the title role while also dealing with the grief of losing Andy Whitfield) showed  us how an already unpleasant person became a genuine monster, and let us in on his long list of people he had it out for. We don’t sympathise, but we understand.

And then there was Ilithyia, the wife of a Roman general and wannabe Politician. She’s hateful. Shades of Cersei Lannister. A terrible person hiding her monstrous nature beneath her stunning wigs. Ancient Rome’s own Regina George, if Regina George bludgeoned someone’s face in. But you understand her. You understand why she is the way she is, and it doesn’t make you sympathise with her, but it makes her a much more fleshed out and effective villain.'

Spartacus MASTERED the ‘villians you love to hate’ trope, perfected it, then used it to power some of the most satisfying moments of comeuppance. Villians in Spartacus had a tendency to escape justice and a good stabbing repeatedly, and it drove all of us watching mad.

So when Ashur got decapitated by a character he had spent two seasons tormenting, when Ilithyia met her end, we cheered and tweeted celebration emojis.

This didn’t just apply to villians! Again, on the barest hope that at least one more person decides to watch the show, I don’t want to spoil anythings, but the writers had a gift for planting seeds that could seem tiny and inconsequential, but branched out and blossomed into incredible moments later in the show(there’s my extended metaphor, hire me Starz).

Based around a Thing That Happened, Spartacus was a show with not only a clear expiration date, but also very tenuous renewal prospects while it was airing. When the original Spartacus, Andy Whitfield, passed away after season 1, we feared the shows imminent cancellation (see footnote 1). It wasn’t! But Spartacus was never long for this world, and the showrunners made sure to make every moment count, to pay off every hanging thread.

Every character had a payoff that made sense, in the end.

3. FUCK, THAT FINALE

Which brings me to the finale. I don’t want to spoil anything, any more than you can spoil the ending of a failed uprising that happened over two thousand years ago. We all knew from the first episode what ending we were heading for. Spartacus made you care about the various characters, Romans and Rebels. We all knew how their stories would end- Crassus and Caesar going on to form the Triumvirate and rule over Rome, the rebellion to be crushed and put to the sword-and yet every death in the finale hits like a punch to the gut. We have been on such a journey with the rebels, we desperately want them to prove Rome wrong, to reach the freedom they deserve. Maybe, just maybe, some of these people will live, will escape, will build something better than the Empire that denied them.

Some of them do. The show broadly follows the historical series of events, but it’s not a Kill Em’ All ending. Instead, the show uses it’s greatest asset-carthasis-to give you an ending that, while exceptionally bloody, is also profoundly affecting.

It’s April 2020. I have a full time job now, teaching children who don’t remember a time before Marvel movies. James Cameron has been saying that he’ll make Avatar sequels for years, and Christchurch is still a mess. I still watch a lot of TV. But nothing has ever been quite as reliable a binge as Spartacus, seeing all the pieces fall into place, watching the dominoes fall, coming out of it with a feeling of satisfaction that ASMR wishes it could achieve.

It’s on Australian and New Zealand Netflix, all four seasons. It’s never been easier to watch.

I’m not sure I’ve convinced anyone, honestly. Maybe Spartacus’ moment has passed. Maybe we’ve all been spoiled by years of high budget TV, and new viewers won’t be able to buy in to the hyper-stylised vision of ancient Rome. Maybe I’ve just written several thousand words to justify my umpteenth rewatch of a show that really doesn’t merit it.

But Jupiter’s cock, I hope you can give it a try.

Footnote 1: When Liam McIntyre was first cast as Spartacus when it was clear that Whitfield would not be well enough to return, Lily described him as ‘The Pepsi to Andy Whitfield’s clearly superior Coke.’

(Credit to all the amazing gif creators whose work I have used)