"By Jupiter's cock!" Spartacus: Blood and Sand, video games, and camp excess

This chapter examines Starz network's Spartacus: Blood and Sand exploring its position as one of the first examples of television that “remediates” (to borrow a term from Bolter and Grusin) aspects of video-games to create an aesthetic of 'camp' excess. The chapter argues that the show’s continued reliance on the camp excesses of video-game aesthetic and narrative conventions results in a program that remains unusual in the contemporary television landscape for acknowledging and foregrounding its own artificiality. Furthermore I discuss whether the show's commercial success in reaching an audience familiar with such populist and critically elided conventions suggests a need for a re-assessment of entrenched hegemonic approaches to television studies, one that recognises the increasingly synergistic and digitised nature of contemporary television.