Starz Announces Final Season of 'Spartacus' Historical accounts suggest that the rebellious gladiator Spartacus met his demise in 71 B.C. after his uprising against the Roman republic was defeated. But on cable television, "Spartacus" is coming to an end in 2013: on Monday, the Starz cable channel is expected to announce that the epic action series's coming season, set to make its debut in January, will be its last. Steven S. DeKnight, the show's creator, said that the new season, called "Spartacus: War of the Damned," would follow the conclusive confrontation between the armies of Spartacus and the Roman general Marcus Crassus. The decision to bring the series to an end now, he said, was one that he, his fellow producers and Starz executives arrived at mutually after several months of discussion. "I think the best-case scenario for a show - this may not be the best financial scenario, but creatively the best scenario is to end your show and leave the audience wanting more," Mr. DeKnight said in a telephone interview. Looking over the last years of the real-life Spartacus, Mr. DeKnight said, "it's basically a series of senators dispatched from Rome to quell the rebellion and one after another get defeated until finally Marcus Crassus goes after Spartacus." Rather than risk repetition, he said he wanted to "get to our main guy faster" and "try to do 10 episodes that were the best we could possibly make." When it made its debut in 2010, "Spartacus," whose first season was subtitled "Blood and Sand," was among the first original series to gain traction for Starz, drawing more than 1 million viewers for new broadcasts of its final few episodes. But plans for subsequent seasons were shifted when the actor Andy Whitfield, who played the title role, was given a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma: a 2011 prequel series, "Gods of the Arena," did not focus on the Spartacus character, and Liam McIntyre took over the role the following season, "Vengeance," which continued the story from "Blood and Sand." Mr. Whitfield died in September. The March 30 finale of "Spartacus: Vengeance" drew 1.45 million viewers, a strong showing compared with the audiences Starz has seen for series like "Boss" and "Magic City." Carmi Zlotnik, the managing director of Starz, said in a telephone interview that it was best to end "Spartacus" now, to "honor the show, its accomplishments and the storytelling." Pointing to other new series that Starz has commissioned, including "Da Vinci's Demons" (about the early life of that Renaissance artist), "Marco Polo" (about the Venetian explorer) and "Black Sails" (a pirate adventure produced by Michael Bay), Mr. Zlotnik said, "Those are shows that have that huge and epic scale associated with them, and we think we'll deliver on some of those same programming values as what "Spartacus" achieved." Mr. DeKnight, who has a development deal at Starz, said a new project of his own would probably be announced in the months ahead. But for now, he must come up with a conclusion to "Spartacus" that is satisfying, particularly to viewers who know their history (or the Stanley Kubrick movie that starred Kirk Douglas). "It's the "Titanic" problem," Mr. DeKnight said. You know the ship's going to sink. How do you get the audience interested? However, Mr. DeKnight added: "We just finished breaking the series finale, and I think we managed to land on something that will be sad but hopeful."