As I have mentioned in my column
and blog many times, all of my criticism takes a narrow view. The shows that I
recommend are only series that I have time to watch. At my most active, I can
watch maybe ten percent of all the series currently on the air, and as a
result, many, many good series have fallen by the wayside. I never got into Downton Abbey, I only sporadically watch
NCIS, and there are so many streaming services that
I barely can watch a few key ones on Netflix and Amazon.
But there are some very popular
series that, even given the fullness of opportunity, that not only would I
never watch, when I hear what they are about and what happens on them, I am
frankly appalled that these are the series that my fellow viewers have chosen
to embrace. Even worse, I wonder what it says for the public that so many of
them worship these series. Today, I'm going to discuss one such series that has
already infected its network, the audience, and frankly the world for reasons
that I can't comprehend: Game of Thrones.
Now, I'll be honest. Initially, I
chose not to watch Game of Thrones out
of any political or artistic reasons. When it premiered, Sundays at 9, I would,
usually and faithfully be watching The
Good Wife with my mother. Political points of view aside, it was a truly
brilliant written, acted and often extremely funny, courtroom drama that
absolutely represented the best of what network TV could do. In fact, I would
spend many articles raging why the Emmys would choose to overindulge one series
and practically ignore the other. (End of digression)
I know, that's a weak excuse. Even
though streaming was still in its infancy at the time, HBO makes a habit of
repeating its original series so many times after the premiere that I could've
chosen to watch the initial episode of Thrones
at any time after the initial premiere. The major reasons I chose not to
watch it were even simpler. I didn't know anything about the books they were
based on, I had major problems with any television series based on fantasy, and
it sounded too much like a mix of period piece and swords and sorcery for me to
even consider quality TV.
A couple of words about George R.R.
Martin. At the time, I didn't know what a polarizing figure he was among the
sci-fi community. I only knew him through his work on the 1980s incarnations of
The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast, and the odd sci-fi
story I'd read, none of which I'd found particular impressive. Furthermore, as
much as it's easy to blame him for a lot, at least some of the blame must go to
showrunners and head-writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Indeed, a good
argument can be made that much of what happens on the series is more their
fault then it is Martin's, particularly in the later seasons where (presumably)
they have begun to depart rather largely from the published books. This doesn't
absolve Martin, particularly as Benioff and Weiss stuck pretty close to the
spirit and text of the novels, but let's at least to be willing to put some of
the blame where it belongs.
But even if I didn't have all the
baggage that pertains to Martin and the world of Westeros that many people, the
fact is, most of my problems with the series would still be there. How much of
this you want to blame on Martin or the show's writing staff is open to debate,
but the fact the problems are there, and frankly, I think they would've been
insurmountable. Let me state them for the record, and explain my problems with
them purely as a television critic.
1. The cast is too large. Now, almost immediately I must quantify
this. I don't have a problem with series with large casts. The New Golden Age
of Television works as well as it does, because of large, multi-talented casts.
It would take an entire article to go through these great series, so I'm going
to limit it solely to HBO dramas.
OZ,
the prison drama that basically started the revolution, began its run with
more than a dozen regular members and nine semi-regulars, and would expand with
each successive season. Deadwood had nearly twenty lead actors
to start show and managed to do a fairly good job expanding all of them in its
(unfortunately) too limited run. And of course, the gold standard for great
television, The Wire, had one of the
most sprawling cast in the history of the medium, starting with two dozen lead
actors, and often putting in a whole new group of regulars with each new
season.
But the difference seems to be,
each series was run by a genius, who knew how to keep things from spiraling
out. Oz was in a claustrophobic
setting, and there was a fairly high death rate. Deadwood was limited almost
entirely to the breadth of the town, and made its missteps when I tried to give
too much room to new characters. And as Simon and his co-writers constantly
said, The Wire was the Great American
Novel with the central character being Baltimore.
Game
of Thrones, in the meantime, seems to deal entirely with so large a realm
that it needs a map over the credits to tell you where everything is. And it
keeps jumping about from location to location so frequently that its nearly
impossible to figure out where the hell you are. There's also the fact that
each season so far has been ten episodes a year, as opposed to the usual
thirteen for HBO, so that even this close to the series end, its hard to tell
who exactly the main characters are. (I
read one article a couple years back saying that even the biggest characters on
Thrones are often limited to no more
than forty minutes of screen time per
season.) Again, I have no problems
with ensemble shows in general, but even in previous ensemble shows, at least
the major characters would interact occasionally. In many cases, most of the
major characters didn't start interacting until Season 5, and that's mainly
because Benioff and Weiss diverted from the text. I know sometimes you need a
chart to keep characters clear; Game of
Thrones would seem to require a wall.
That's a huge burden for any
series, and that wouldn't bother me so much, if not for the second point:
2. Characters keep dying, and they keep dying horribly. Again, I
don't have a problem with series where characters are killed. A fairly solid
argument could be made that's part of what makes the New Golden Age so special:
no one is safe. (Declan may have problems with this, but even he admits it
works at times: his favorite season of 24
was Day 5, and that's the day which by far had the highest body count.) And
indeed, so many of the great shows of this era - in addition to the ones I've
mentioned, I'll add Breaking Bad and Lost - work so well because when the death comes, it
stings a lot.
What I have problem with our series
where the characters seem to die arbitrarily or for the sole purpose of shock
value. This isn't the sole property of Thrones,
either: Shonda Rhimes seems to be even bloodier, and I've had major issues with
series like Sons of Anarchy that seem
to delight in killing people unpleasantly. What makes Game of Thrones particularly unpleasant is that it seems to revel
in killing off its very large cast in particularly unpleasant way often before
we even get to know them. It was one thing when Ned Stark got killed, the
series had built so much around him in the first season, you almost forgot what
was in the book. But from this point, the butcheries just seem to come constantly
and using all the gore that HBO can get away with. Indeed, they seem to delight
in following characters for an entire season, and have you get attached them,
and then mindlessly slaughter them in as public a way as possible. (It probably
goes without saying, but if you get a wedding invitation in Westeros, don't
RSVP.)
All of this has a level of reaching
the kind of detachment you need to get through your typical teenage slasher
movie, which would be fine. Sometimes you need that to get through some dark
series. Except it now seems that the whole point of the series - the battle for
the Iron Throne - is solely go to depend on which character is still alive
after all the slaughter. Now, I know battles for thrones can be bloody, but
this is ludicrous. Frankly, I'm amazed so many people are still taking it
seriously. Or maybe that's not why they watch. Which brings me to my final
problem:
3. The copious, ridiculous sex. Declan and I had a running gag
about a similarly blood and sex soaked HBO series. We said that the real
difference between True Blood and
porn is that porn has less nudity. You could substitute Game of Thrones and not have much a debate. Of course, the major
difference between Thrones and Blood is that in Thrones, the majority of the sex is incest, half the time known, half the time it is unknown, and all
if it pretty violent. Hell, the pilot opened with a scene where the Lannister
twins were spotted having sex, and the more onlooker was thrown out a castle
window! It's gotten a lot worse from there,
And even when the people who are
having sex aren't related (which is the other half of the sex) it can get
pretty darn perverse. If there's a field for this kind of sex (and given the
mass popularity of the novels and the series, its probably a lot bigger than
we'd like to believe), at least, its not doing anything radically new, even on
the levels of TV series. (There've been two series on the Borgias that came
around the same time, and I think True
Blood as well had a fair amount, though again, that's just rumor.) What is
the most horrifying part of the sex is the brutalization of women. Now, you
would\think in this new era of female abuse there'd be some mass outcry for the
way that female characters on this series have been debased and often
brutalized. There was a fair amount on controversy when one of the surviving
Stark children, barely in her teen, was essentially raped on her wedding night.
But it didn't last very long, mainly because not that long afterward all
everybody cared about was whether or not Jon Snow was alive or dead.
One could make the argument that
this shaming of women is part of time and place, but since we don't know when
or even where this series is taking place, that holds very little water with
me. It doesn't seem to bother millions of other fans, and that troubles me even
more. Not quite as much as the untold millions who worship Shonda Rhimes or The Walking Dead, but it is very
troubling.
However, I will be honest. There is
one thing about Game of Thrones that
I admire. It is simultaneously the biggest and smallest thing about. I speak,
of course, about the magnificent Peter Dinklage and his work as Tyrion Lannister.
Unlike the majority of viewers, I
had actually heard of Dinklage before his work on this show. He is a formidable
and charismatic actor who, but for his stature, would have been a superstar
actor in a field. As it is, he had already managed quite a remarkable career in
the independent film industry, most memorably in The Station Agent and Find Me
Guilty. The matching of him with
this kind of fantasy role should've been a no-brainer, but Dinklage, prior to
this series, avoided these roles because he didn't want to be typecast. Indeed,
he made it very clear when he was cast in the role of Tyrion that he didn't
want to have to grow the conventional beard associated with so many fairy
tales. When he finally had to grow one, he made it clear it was going to be
that of desperate fugitive, not a cuddly dwarf.
Dinklage is by far the best thing
about this series. He plays Tyrion like Richard III
melded with Frank Urquhart/Underwood, with the drinking and whoring of Falstaff
thrown in. From the beginning of the series, he has been one of the more
magnificent schemers - he's literally the red-headed stepchild of the family,
and he knows the only way he's going to get power is by manipulation. For that
reason, he is generally loathed everyone, and the feeling is mutual He is probably the only character on the
series one feels even the remotest amount of sympathy for, even though he would
probably disdain the viewer for doing so.
And of course, he is responsible
for the one truly glorious moment of the show. In season 4, after months of
being suspected of the murder of his nephew, he goes before the court, and
yells out: "I did not kill Tyrell Lannister, but I wish to God I had! His
death brought be more pleasure than a thousand whores!" You could hear the
ping of brilliance in that moment, mainly because it was surrounded in the
filth and noise and bloodshed of hundreds of other beastly acts. Now, I'm not
saying that Dinklage deserved the Emmys he's gotten for Game of Thrones, but he deserves to get awards for something, and
if this the only way to get them, I can't begrudge them that.
But for all that, Game of Thrones is almost entirely a
bloody, disgusting orgy of violence that even for HBO represents the worst
elements of pay cable with little of the benefits. I'm inclined to give the
network some credit because I know its because of popular shows like Thrones and True Blood, HBO has been given the latitude to experiment with less
showy dramas and comedies. We probably wouldn't have gotten The Deuce or Big Little Lies or Insecure or
any of HBO's other brilliant experimental series without these monstrosities.
What bothers me is that HBO seems to be its
future is Game of Thrones. The series
is scheduled to come to an end in the summer of 2019. But there are at least
four other prequel or sequel based series being planned, and one is already in
production. Is this going to be what HBO looks like in the 2020s, with half of
its schedule devoted to Westeros?
The world of television has been
expanding exponentially in the new millennium. For the most part, I consider
this a good thing, as it has allowed for truly magnificent programming. And HBO
must be given credit - a lot of it -for leading the charge. But HBO lost its
place at the top of the pyramid when it expanded its reach beyond its grasp ten
years. Could winter really be coming, not only to Westeros, but to HBO? There are plenty of other services more than
willing to take the crown. Indeed, AMC,
Showtime, and Netflix have spent most of the past ten years showing they have
the imagination and the will to do so. I really hope that the network that
showed the realism of Sopranos and Six Feet Under and so many other great
series hasn't decided its future lies with dragons and Wind Walkers. That would
be a fate I'm not even sure Jon Snow would want to come back for.
