Spartacus

I don't normally write about television. Because it's television. I don't get criticizing shows for their lack of [insert your preferred demographic], or their failure to be properly [insert your preferred cause] because telly shows are produced to sell shit to people who cannot afford to buy that shit.

Some are well written. Some are not.

I started watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand, "just to laugh at [it] and stayed with because [I] couldn't stop watching" it.  I thought it would be a poorly written, soft-porn train wreck.

It's not.

What it is is a surprisingly well produced, acted and even more than occasionally well written passion play. Perhaps most significantly, it is unrelenting in its portrayal of the upper classes of late Republican Rome - and by rather obvious imputation, the wealthy in general - as a venal, grasping nest of asps and climbing spiders. Spartacus is unforgiving in its depiction of the ruling and upper classes. Every choice made by a slave owner, magistrate, legate or equestrian merchant overlord results in surprisingly well sketched degradation of an immediate and identifiable gladiator, house slave or commoner. The connection between power and violence done to the lower classes and the slaves is drawn in stark imagery; and it is done to characters the show's producers have invested considerable talent in persuading the audience to embrace. No sexual act between the rulers and the ruled is ever treated as voluntary. No exchange or bargain offered by a Batiatus, Ilythia, Lucretia or Claudius to a slave is ever kept honestly, or honorably.

The message, written in blood and betrayal, is stark: the poor may be brutal, because they are brutalized, but the wealthy cannot ever be trusted.

That's refreshing, for English language television, especially here in the States, where we get a choice between Noble Cop, Noble Doctor, Noble White Teacher, the Noble Magic Negro or the Noble Spy Who Must Unfortunately Kill Brown People.

So, it's sort of sad (in a way I would not have expected) to learn that the star (Andy Whitfield) who gave the fictionalized Spartacus such compelling life has died from the cancer which forced him to leave the show.

Thirty-nine is too young for anyone.

In this one case, it's too young for a man who'd taken a "laughable" sexed up Starz original show and turned into in a story of pathos, revenge and even moments of high art.