As you said, blood, sex, porn, and you forgot to mention, strong language. But I could actually argue with you about whether it was porn, because the sex was not there for the purpose of sexually stimulating the viewer, which is what porn is for, but it was just part of the background and the attempt to make that background realistic.
But the people, the characters, their relationships, were fascinating, as well as the history, to whatever extent the history is accurate, and I think it's impossible to know that now. I read a Wikipedia article about the history of the slave rebellion, and it was almost scene-by-scene identical to the TV series. That Wikipedia article almost could have served as a script for the TV series.
I think very little is actually known about the historical Spartacus and the slave rebellion, because the Romans tried really hard to scrub the historical record clean about those events after the rebellion was put down.
So when they make movies and TV shows about it now, they have to start with the very sketchy history and fill it in with stuff they just make up. And that, I am sure, is why the Wikipedia article I read sounds so much like the TV series. It was being presented as a historical record but was actually a synopsis of the historical fiction that was the TV series.
-- Ron
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