<em>Editor&rsquo;s note: TV critic Aaron Barnhart is in Pasadena, Calif., for the annual Television Critics Association fall tour.</em></p><p>When the cast of &ldquo;Spartacus: Blood and Sand&rdquo; took their seats on stage, the press in the hotel ballroom were as silent as a hapless gladiator whose head has just been separated from his shoulders.</p><p>It was a stark contrast to the bloodthirsty screams that greeted Lucy Lawless &mdash; the once and forever &ldquo;Xena: Warrior Princess&rdquo; &mdash; just a few days earlier at the fan-tastic Comic-Con International in San Diego. There, the onetime quiver-wielding, leather-skirt-wearing syndicated TV star and lesbian icon was greeted as a conquering heroine.</p><p>Here, not so much. Journalistic protocol at the twice-yearly TV critics&rsquo; tours obliges us to keep our game faces on. </p><p>As a tour veteran, however, I detected no obvious efforts to hold back excitement for the new cable series Lawless has signed on for, one that borrows the title, if not the libretto, of Stanley Kubrick&rsquo;s 1960 historical epic &ldquo;Spartacus.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s scheduled to begin airing in January.</p><p>You may not know that Starz has more subscribers than Showtime. That&rsquo;s because for years Starz focused not on producing TV shows but on acquiring the best Hollywood movies for its 16 million subscribers. Two problems with that strategy: You can&rsquo;t get any publicity for a movie you&rsquo;re running on TV, and you&rsquo;re renting instead of owning. </p><p>So Starz has started ramping up its efforts to produce shows of its own. In the business we call them &ldquo;originals,&rdquo; though that&rsquo;s not exactly the word that came to mind when &ldquo;Crash,&rdquo; the first drama series on Starz, debuted last year. After all, it was based on the Oscar-winning movie, with a new cast (including Dennis Hopper in a juicy Phil Spector-ish role).</p><p>Now comes &ldquo;Spartacus: Blood and Sand,&rdquo; another show inspired by a movie. There, however, the connection ends. This &ldquo;Spartacus&rdquo; has nothing to do with the Stanley Kubrick film about the gladiator who led an unlikely rebellion against the Roman Empire. No, it&rsquo;s more like HBO&rsquo;s &ldquo;Rome&rdquo; meets the movie &ldquo;300&rdquo; in a sexy-bloody romp.</p><p>This &ldquo;Spartacus&rdquo; 2.0 will employ &ldquo;the latest in digital technology to create unique environments that have never been seen before on a series,&rdquo; according to Bob Clasen, the CEO of Starz. </p><p>Oh, sure, they could have gone to Africa and shot the thing with thousands of extras, but, as executive producer Rob Tapert explained at Comic-Con, &ldquo;we didn&rsquo;t have the financial resources.&rdquo; </p><p>In the next breath, Tapert also said that it made no sense for &ldquo;Spartacus&rdquo; to replicate the realistic violence of those other productions anyway. He said his show would aim for &ldquo;operatic violence,&rdquo; though given the state of the art, &ldquo;Spartacus&rdquo; will blur the lines between a movie kill and a video-game kill.</p><p>Clasen compared &ldquo;Spartacus: CGI&rdquo; to &ldquo;a graphic novel come to life&rdquo; and promised there would be &ldquo;nothing held back in terms of violence, sexuality or language.&rdquo; </p><p>To prove the point, he unveiled a four-minute sizzle reel for TV critics that he called &ldquo;the uncut, what-they-wouldn&rsquo;t-let-us-show version&rdquo; of the tamer Comic-Con trailer. </p><p>From what I could tell, however, the TV critics&rsquo; reel had the same 14 shots of CGI blood flying off the bodies of unlucky victims that I saw the week before in San Diego.