30 Day TV Meme

Day 01 - A show that should never have been canceled

Day 02 - A show that you wish more people were watching

I wish everyone was watching Spartacus. I know that the show looks like a low budget music video with a whole bunch of over the top stylised violence and a fuck ton of nudity aimed at the 14 year old male demographic, but it really is so much more than that.

The first four episodes are kind of exactly that, and then the plot kicks in and it's really one of the greatest shows I've ever watched. The violence takes getting used to, but the over-the-topness kind of helps with that. You also have to get used to the dialogue - they've taken out all the articles to make English sound a bit more like Latin, and at first it sounds odd, but it really works after a while.

Someone at The AV Club once said - The show Spartacus has killed more great characters than other shows have had in their entire run. And it's true, every character in Spartacus has light and shadow. You think you hate someone one minute than you find yourself sympathising with them the next minute. And vice versa. No one's safe, and there is so much storyline packed into each episode - I think they fit another show's entire season's worth of plot into one episode sometimes.

In a show full of men, the women aren't without agency. They use the tools given them - whether it's sex, power, manipulation or just actual physical violence to get what they want. And what they want is often, just to survive the cut throat world in which they live.

I also love the way homosexual relationships are portrayed in this show - some of these great big gladiator/warrior men have male lovers/partners and they are treated exactly the same as hetero ones. No one questions it, and gay sex scenes are sometimes segued in straight after straight ones, leaving teenage boys going 'WTF', but the creator doesn't give a damn what his main audience demographic thinks. There are just as many cocks on screen as there are boobs.

Everyone is pretty in this show, I am always watching it with my heart in my mouth - I never know what's going to happen, except when that it does, I realise that it probably has been telegraphed since the first episode if only I had been paying more attention.

Please watch this show. Please please please. There's only 5 more episodes until it's finished FOREVER. And it's going to be awesome, a show that knows exactly what story it had to tell, and has told it in the exact number of episodes it needed to tell it. (The network wanted to give them more episodes, but the creator said he'd only need 10 episodes this season!)


( Day 3-30 )