For as long as this write-up may be, I don’t personally have a whole lot to say about Starz’s “Spartacus,” mostly because Starz didn’t have a whole lot to offer up about “Spartacus” except a lot of talk from the show’s creative team.

Executive producer Rob Tapert describes it as “our reinterpretation of the famous Stanley Kubrick movie,” calling it “a hard-core, testosterone-driven action drama unlike anything on television right now” and “a totally R-rated, hard, hard show that still has all the things that you need in storylines but that delivers the action component that theatrical audiences expect from their entertainment.” Sounds great…but it would sound a lot more impressive if they actually had anything at all to show us or, indeed, had even cast Spartacus yet.

“Goddammit, I said I’M Spartacus!”

Granted, it’s promising that the show is being produced by Tapert and his longtime associate, Sam Raimi, and to have Steven S. DeKnight as head writer and show-runner is certainly good news for those who’ve followed his work on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel,” and “Smallville.” (He’s also a major player in Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse.”) But you’d be a fool to be but so optimistic when you’ve not seen a single frame of the series, and the fact that it’s going to be extremely CGI-heavy makes me a little nervous, but here are a few quotes from the creative team to help get your hopes up.

SEX AND VIOLENCE:

“It was a brutal, brutal time in history where the Roman society was taught not to shy away from blood and violence. It was part of being a man. You had to prove yourself with the military basically to climb up the political class system, and these gladiator fights could be incredibly brutal. I mean, it was guys going at each other with swords and tridents and various weapons. So we are not shying away from that element. We are embracing the brutality of the fights. The sexuality of the times…it was a very different kind of sexual feeling, particularly with the slave class, where it was completely acceptable to have sex with your slaves, even inside of a marriage. Usually it was fine for a man to have sex with female slaves and sometimes the male slaves. It was a little bit trickier for the woman, but we don’t want to shy away from either the violence or the sexuality of the period. We’re trying not to put it on screen just because we can. We want it to come from the story that if this story leads us to an extremely violent incident, we want to be able to show it and the same thing sexually.” (Steven S. DeKnight)

STAND-ALONE EPISODES VS. STORY ARCS:

“Each season will have its arc. Within that, within the arc, episodes will have a beginning, middle and end, not necessarily your complete move away from the main story and have it a completely self-contained story, but there will be beginnings, middles, and ends of each episode under the umbrella of a bigger arc.” (Steven S. DeKnight)

“It will allow people who don’t watch it every single week to watch an episode and feel like they’re not lost at the beginning and they have a complete entertainment experience within that hour. I love serialization, I love the ability to tell that, but that said, within an hour, I like to have a beginning, middle, and end to the entertainment experience.” (Rob Tapert)

THE CHARACTERS:

“We are adding characters (that weren’t in the movie). We’re fleshing it out. There will be the main characters. There will be Spartacus, the owner of the school Batiatus. There will be the other two main gladiators Crixus and Oenomaus. Along with this we are creating new characters to fill out the ranks. There will be other gladiators. We’re giving Batiatus a wife. There will be a bunch of new characters. Within most of them, we’re pulling from usually a composite of actual historical characters or our best guess or suggestions from our historical consultants. You will see Crassus. You will see Glaber at some point.” (Steven S. DeKnight)

THE INEVITABLE “ROME” COMPARISONS

“I love the HBO series. I watched it. I wish that it had delivered more testosterone for me. It was pretty darn historically accurate, and we feel like “Rome” was its own show and this is a very different stylistic approach to the same material…or to historical material that has nothing to do with that. We’re a green screen show. We’ll never go outside. We’re not building Rome. We’re building Rome in 3-D models basically or Capua in this particular case. So it’s a different take and a different presentation of a historical event.” (Rob Tapert)

“I absolutely loved ‘Rome.’ But I think if you want to encapsulate more towards what this show is, there’s a gladiator fight in ‘Rome.’ I believe it was in Season 1 that actually I leaped off my couch when I saw it. And I think that’s closer to what the essence of this show is. And just speaking towards Crassus, Crassus, oddly, historically was not gay. He had a wife and kids and an entire family. But there will definitely be gay characters on the show, and relationships.” (Steven S. DeKnight)

ON THE CGI LOOK OF THE SHOW:

“It’s not going to be super monochromatic like a ‘Sin City’ or a ‘Spirit,’ nor is it going to be totally like the action scenes within ‘300.’ The stylization will come in the action scenes and the portrayal of violence. Once you get into Batiatus’s bedroom or into the school itself, it will have a design and a look that is slightly stylized, but no more so than a modern-day feature film. When you think of ‘300,’ there were a lot of scenes away from the action that took place just in him sleeping with his wife, or back in the Senate, or within the house, or within the garden at the beginning. Those were effected in the post-production process, but they actually weren’t special effects. There was no CGI. So we will make sure that the process serves the storytelling and not the other way around.” (Rob Tapert)

ON CASTING SPARTACUS:

“We are having a worldwide search for the role of Spartacus. We have our eyes on certain other characters, No. 2 through 13 on the call sheet, so to speak. So there are some people that we have in mind or that we’ve seen that we like for some parts. Percentage-wise, I don’t know where people are coming from, but I’m going to guess the bulk of the cast will come from outside of New Zealand, for a whole host of reasons. So we are actively looking. We have casting directors kind of everywhere, and we’re right dead smack in the middle of that. Ultimately, we want somebody who is an undiscovered action star. And when I think of the Daniel Craigs and the Viggos and Russell Crowe and all these characters, there aren’t many recently that have been Midwest American boys. We don’t know, and we’ll take them where we find them. But just if you were a betting man, it seems like history recently has shown that these heroic arc types come from somewhere else, but we certainly wouldn’t close a single door, and we’re looking here (in Los Angeles) and in New York and everywhere we can.” (Rob Tapert)

“Spartacus” premieres on Starz in the summer of 2009.