Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

You can have “Outlander,” “Power” and all their spinoffs: There’s never been a better Starz series than “Spartacus,” the graphic swords, sandals and sex drama that spilled gallons of CGI blood and prosthetic genitalia across premium cable screens from 2010 to 2013.

But it wasn’t those subversive elements that made “Spartacus” so compulsively watchable. It was series creator/writer Steven S. DeKnight’s ability to weave an addictive, soapy story through the show’s characters. Come for the bloody battles, stay for the verbal jousting styled in a syntax that feels historic and foreign.

But can DeKnight (“Daredevil,” “Jupiter’s Legacy”) revisit his best creation in a way that satisfies existing “Spartacus” fans and contemporary audiences? Turns out he can, even if it takes some early story contortions to accomplish it.

For “Spartacus: House of Ashur,” premiering with two episodes at 9 p.m. Dec. 5 (on Starz linear, app, streaming and on demand), DeKnight resurrects the turncoat Ashur (Nick E. Tarabay, “The Expanse”) in a “what if?” scenario.

There’s some throat-clearing as Ashur’s soul encounters the late Lucretia (Lucy Lawless, reprising her “Spartacus” role) in hell and she gives Ashur a second chance: What if Ashur had lived? He awakens and instead of being killed by Spartacus, Ashur is now the guy who took down Spartacus. Beyond that – and Batiatus’ ludus still standing – “House of Ashur” effectively functions as a sequel series. (Other than many references to Spartacus, “House of Ashur” doesn’t require knowledge of what came before.)

To make this series worth revisiting, DeKnight finds new themes to explore and creates a raft of new characters, including a female gladiator (Tenika Davis) who shares some similarities with Ashur, a fresh twist on what’s come before.

Ashur is derisively referred to as “the Syrian,” a former slave and warrior who’s now dominus of his own house at the behest of his off-screen benefactor, Crassus. Ashur’s former slave status doesn’t go over well with the Capua elites, especially Cossutia, played by “Farscape” star Claudia Black, flawlessly stepping into what’s a successor character to Lucy Lawless’ role in the original “Spartacus” series.

While early episodes are heavier on “300”-style bloody fights and full-frontal male and female nudity – sometimes in the same scene! — the franchise’s delicious character drama amps up a few episodes into the season. This is the good stuff that makes “Spartacus” more than the sum of its arguably gratuitous parts.

In a mid-November Zoom interview, DeKnight said Starz and producing studio Lionsgate approached him about reviving “Spartacus.”

“The main question [of ‘House of Ashur’] is can a very bad man, given a second chance, be a better person… or will his baser nature continually drag him down?” DeKnight said, acknowledging he’s already plotted “House of Ashur” through five seasons that could contract or expand as needed.

Starz continues to give a wide berth to the show’s producers around gore, nudity and sex, DeKnight said, pointing to the Starz motto, “We’re all adults here.”

“We approach the [sex scenes] the same way we approach action scenes or a fight,” DeKnight said. “It’s never just about the action. It’s about who wants what? What are the stakes? Who’s trying to maneuver? Who’s trying to get ahead? The sex scenes are the same way. Somebody always wants something, needs something. It’s part of the story; it’s building relationships that will break apart.”

The language of “Spartacus” has always been as significant a differentiator as the visuals. Characters speak in a somewhat stilted style that’s English but with enough articles dropped (bye-bye “the,” “a,” “an”) as to sound vaguely foreign (e.g. “Honored arrival breaks upon heels of glorious news”). Characters say “gratitude” instead of “thank you;” “apologies” instead of “I’m sorry.”

“I always describe it as Shakespeare meets Conan the Barbarian,” DeKnight said. “When I was doing the original show, I wanted something that had a feel of antiquity, that felt like it wasn’t modern times, while not going full Shakespeare, which would be very difficult for a modern-day audience to absorb.”

Actress Claudia Black acknowledged the challenge of the show’s dialogue.

“I was texting Steven, going, ‘Absent articles, language proves challenging,’ [as Cossutia would speak],” Black said. “There’s a poetry, there’s a rhythm. [You have] to get the tongue and the mouth around said poetry, and trust that the language itself is going to carry and that we don’t have to force it or work too hard, but at the same time as a performer, make sure all those emotional underpinnings are actually there.”

Black appeared in the first season of Disney+’s “Ahsoka” as Klothow, one of the three Great Mothers from Dathomir, but she won’t be back in the “Star Wars” show’s second season (“We just could not figure out a way to make it work financially on either side”). And there’s nothing new on any sort of “Farscape” revival (“It found a new audience on streamers over covid. It just needs to find relevancy. It’s difficult to explain why that world should reboot and exist in the now, because the world has changed”).

DeKnight said he wrote the Lady MacBeth-like Cossutia specifically for Black.

“She carries such a Roman bearing,” he said. “The minute she comes on screen, you know exactly who she is, and she’s such a phenomenal actress. I really needed someone with that kind of power and gravitas to inhabit that role.”

Black said the appeal of this new “Spartacus” for her was the layers DeKnight built into all the characters.

“Understanding that the whole world is built upon this archaic language, it’s a really deceptive show at first glance,” Black said, “because you think, ‘Oh, this is bold and bawdy, and it’s got the violence and the sex,’ but there’s a broad and deep intelligence to it and a thoughtfulness.”

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