George R.R. Martin’s epic Game of Thrones is still a TV phenomenon
Gratuitous nudity, violence and, by the end of the first episode, a sex scene between twins. Even for HBO, Game of Thrones seemed bold.
It is 10 years this month since HBO premiered the first episode of Game of Thrones, an epic fantasy of blood, violence, lust and power created by David Benioff and DB Weiss, based on the book series A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin.
The five-volume saga, which began in 1996 and still has at least two books to go (Martin began the sixth instalment, The Winds of Winter, in 2010 and has still not finished, much to many fans’ annoyance), electrified millions with its tale of warring families battling for the seat of power in the fictional land of Westeros (there are many more lands in this universe, by the by).
When they aren’t fighting each other, these families also encounter evil zombies (“wights” led by “White Walkers”), dragons, giants, warlocks and murderous smoke monsters. Martin had always thought the books were too complex to be made into movies, but that a TV series might work. Thus began one of the most massively popular and intensely debated television shows of all time.
Game of Thrones already had a built-in fanbase of Ice and Fire followers, but quickly built a cult viewership of new adopters when it aired in Australia on Foxtel.
In true HBO style, it was filled with gratuitous nudity, violence and, by the conclusion of the very first episode, a sex scene between twins. Even for a cable network known for pushing the boundaries, it seemed particularly bold. The written material made viewers feel certain that despite the sprawling nature of the story, there was actually a game plan (shows like Lost have demonstrated just how quickly things can fall apart when the creators don’t know where the story is meant to end up). It felt like a wise investment of your time and that you would be rewarded for it.
In terms of its legacy, Game of Thrones also helped shift ideas of what a quality, prestige TV show could be. Previously ultra-gritty programs like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad were praised for their authenticity and water-cooler moments sparked by posing big existential questions about morality. Game of Thrones had all these things too – but sometimes the scenes of complex epiphanies also included a zombie ice king.
Fantasy as a genre has often been unfairly maligned as juvenile and silly, but Game of Thrones drew in viewers who ordinarily would avoid stories about dragons. It wasn’t just that it was good. There’s no other word for it – the show was cool. It may not have kickstarted the Golden Age of television, but in terms of budgets and scope, it certainly escalated it.
Prestige drama requires a certain type of attention to detail. Game of Thrones wasn’t the kind of show you’d watch while scrolling through your phone, and repaid dedication by revisiting old characters, plot points and even phrases sometimes many seasons later. It was superbly acted, with everything from the costumes to the breathtaking locations (including Northern Ireland, Croatia, Iceland and Morocco) and even the opening credits meticulously and thoughtfully designed. Because the show was so dense, it also inspired a very enthusiastic and, at times, academic recap culture on the internet. At the show’s inception, these recaps were methodical in their detailing of family lines, geography and background book info. But as the popularity of the show grew, there was a large enough viewership to sustain a hunger for both serious recaps and lighthearted reviews. I know this because for the last three or four seasons I wrote a “Power Rankings” of Game of Thrones characters on youth media website Junkee, classifying which characters had “won” the episode. These rankings were mainly an excuse for me to lovingly make gags at the (deliberately and not deliberately) sillier aspects of the show. More than once I was told by a reader that after watching an episode, they would go to a certain recapper for the answers to specific plot questions, then my Power Rankings for the jokes they had texted to friends after the episode. The show was so rich that reading multiple articles about each episode didn’t feel like overkill.
In saying that: the only thing better than watching Game of Thrones was talking about it. In many ways it was one of the last pieces of monoculture we had left. The last decade has seen the media landscape increasingly fractured – there are so many things to consume on so many different platforms that it’s rare for a single piece of pop culture to capture the attention of the many. But it felt like everyone watched Game of Thrones.
You could walk into any office anywhere in the world on a Tuesday morning and say, “What did you think of … ?” and suddenly be surrounded by co-workers debating if Daenerys will go “mad” like her father, if Jon could possibly survive a knife to the heart, if Tyrion really did poison Joffrey, if Jaime is essentially good or essentially bad and if that matters, and what the hell the Three-Eyed-Raven actually does. Coffee would be spilt, frantic googling to settle disputes about lineage would take place and it would dominate the day’s conversation. You would have a week to think about red herrings or peculiar bits of world-building and then it would start all over again.
From 2011 to 2019, making small talk at a wedding was never easier.
Game of Thrones knew how it was being consumed, and its legendary shocking moments – beheadings, battles and gruesome ends to several weddings – almost always happened in the second-last episode of the season. The night of the infamous “Red Wedding” episode in its third season — which I won’t spoil, but continues to be one of the most shocking episodes of TV I have ever seen — was genuinely astonishing as it seemed to defy every rule I knew about storytelling on TV. Main characters died, leaving you unsure who to root for, traditional heroes became villains and the villains became the people you sympathised with the most.
As the show progressed, the stakes got higher in plot and production terms — a battle scene in Season 6 episode “Battle of the Bastards” included 500 extras and took 25 days to film. Aside from the mythology in the story world – which is dense, vast and connected to a literary universe that is not yet complete – the show became so intoxicatingly ubiquitous that fan folklore, too, grew ever more detailed.
Stories about the production were passed around like gossip and, given the long gaps between the seasons — it was a year between Seasons 7 and 8, an eternity in pre-pandemic TV — there was plenty of time to pontificate. It emerged that Benioff and Weiss only got the gig because when Martin asked them who they thought Jon Snow’s real mother was, they guessed correctly. And that the original pilot of Game of Thrones they shot was such a colossal disaster, they ended up up-ending the production with drastic recasting and reshoots
The HBO documentary about the conclusion of the series, Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, further fuelled our behind-the-scenes addiction. We saw the first-time actors realise the ultimate fate of their characters (Kit Harrington, who plays reluctant hero Jon Snow, covers his mouth in shock multiple times) and revealed how the physical sets of the show became so humungous that condensing the number of episodes in the final season was not only preferred, but necessary.
By its final season, Game of Thrones had charted its fair share of controversy. It was accused of being insensitive in its depictions of sexual assault and lacking in nuance in the writing of its non-male characters. Some fantasy fans felt as though the supernatural elements of the story were neglected and the condensed timeline of the last two seasons left many viewers scratching their heads. But it also not only changed the way prestige TV shows were made, but the way we talk about them. I hope there will be another TV show that so totally captures the imaginations of its viewers. Then again, maybe it’s just time for a rewatch.
Sinead Stubbins’s debut book, In My Defence, I Have No Defence, is out on May 25 and is available for pre-order now.
How did Game of Thrones become such a phenomenon?
Winter came and went, leaving millions disappointed by the ending and a generation of adolescent boys exhausted from over-stimulation. Many more wondered whether all the blood and bare bottoms were strictly necessary.
But few would argue that HBO’s “Game of Thrones”, celebrating its 10th birthday on April 17, was anything less than a televisual phenomenon.
Much to the chagrin of TV executives, figuring out how to repeat its global success remains as much a mystery as how anyone ever built a 700-foot wall entirely out of ice.
The winning components are clear, not least HBO’s penchant for naked -- usually female -- bodies. The non-stop sex brought controversy, especially when it was less consensual than in the original books, starting with the brutal consummation of Daenerys’ marriage to Khal Drogo in the first episode in 2011. “I think they misjudged the audience at the very beginning... There was something quasi-pornographic going on there,” said Carolyne Larrington, a medieval literature professor at the University of Oxford and author of “All Men Must Die: Power and Passion in Game of Thrones”. But overall, according to the experts at MrSkin.com, the show sits a lowly seventh in the all-time TV nudity rankings, with 82 nude scenes (74 percent female and a 4:1 vagina-to-penis ratio). That’s far below “Shameless” and “True Blood”, with 236 and 137 nude scenes, respectively.
Gore was another attraction, with a catalogue of skin-flaying, eye-gouging, throat-slitting, horse-heart-eating carnage that, famously, refused to spare even the show’s main characters.
Their unpredictable chances of survival added to its addictive appeal as the deaths racked up -- 59 in season one, soaring to 3,523 in the massacrous eighth and final season, according to data site Statista. Still, there are more violent shows around and titillation alone cannot explain a viewership that reached 207 countries and saw 19.3 million people tune in live for the final episode in 2019 in the United States alone, according to HBO. Media analysts Parrot Analytics said it was still the most talked-about show through 2020, a year after it finished.
Much of the credit must go to the spectacular way in which the world of Westeros was brought to life by showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff, and above all to the rich story-telling of George R.R. Martin, on whose books the show was based.
“What made the show so interesting were the twin poles of power politics and family,” said Larrington.
“How you gain power and how you exercise it... and how the young people spend the whole eight seasons looking for ways not to be like their parents or grandparents... these are what gave it its universal appeal.”
For all the criticism around its treatment of women, the story had complex female characters at its core. “To maximise your audience, it’s no good for fantasy shows simply to have manly men doing manly things while the women are just damsels in distress or mothers looking concerned,” Larrington said.
Even for fans of the books, the success came as a shock. “It’s still hard to believe that the show exploded into a phenomenon like it did,” said Myles McNutt, author of “Game of Thrones: A Guide to Westeros and Beyond”.
“It could have been that Martin’s story was more accessible than we realised but it just had to be unburdened from the intimidating size of his novels.” He said that the timing also helped, coming just as social media became a vital part of TV viewing.
“Game of Thrones” was indeed the show that launched a thousand memes. Many even found their way into political discourse, from a British lawmaker warning that winter would come if people didn’t vote for Brexit, to then-president Donald Trump tweeting an image of himself in the show’s artwork with the words “Sanctions Are Coming” aimed at Iran.
It may be no surprise that concocting the next hit fantasy show looks challenging. HBO has multiple prequels in development, though only one, “House of the Dragon” is so far greenlit.
Amazon, meanwhile, has forked out $250 million for the rights to “Lord of the Rings”. But the stakes are high, as the makers of “Game of Thrones” found when the final series was vilified by fans for seeming rushed. Some 1.8 million people -- and counting -- have signed a petition demanding it be remade “with competent writers”.
McNutt said that it was unclear how audiences would respond to new takes on their favourite parallel worlds. “But HBO and Amazon are betting hundreds of millions of dollars that ‘Game of Thrones’ opened the door to a thriving future for fantasy television, and that’s definitely never something I would have imagined a decade ago when the show premiered,” he added.
AFP