Breathtaking television: why Game of Thrones leaves the rest behind
Power, passion, intrigue and teenage assassins. In this cross-posting from The Conversation Jason Jacobs looks at why HBO drama Game of Thrones is such compelling TV and the lessons for content makers.
When Game of Thrones returns to screens for its fifth season on Sunday night, US time, it will no doubt continue to attract the critical and popular praise that it richly deserves.
DB Weiss and David Benioff’s HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s string of fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, has achieved its cultural prominence not because of the vast amount of cash invested in the production and not on the back of the passionate fan base for the books. It’s not even the lucky coincidence of industrial changes in Hollywood television organisation over the past 20 years that have made it more hospitable to signature television, that is, television with strong authorial identity, style and attitude.
No: Game of Thrones is successful simply because it is much better than most other television and, for that matter, most other contemporary cultural output.
That’s something that is not explainable by merely pointing to its fidelity to the books on which it is based, or its budget. There are many other well-funded television shows that blend history, sex, violence in a genre package, such as Marco Polo, The Borgias, Wolf Hall and Spartacus. The thing is, picking a formula and loading it with cash and a sprinkling of talent doesn’t guarantee critical or popular success: art and culture do not work like that.
What Game of Thrones does best
So what is the distinction of Game of Thrones – what makes it better?
First of all it avoids the temptation to import a bunch of boutique contemporary issues into its narrative.
The women depicted in it, for example, would have little truck with the contemporary feminist tendency to paint women as vulnerable victims in need of legal and state protections against feral men. Daenerys, Brienne and Arya are valiant as lions and cunning as foxes: armies, weapons and courage are their currency. We’ve watched them over four seasons carving out a space for themselves in a hostile world full of pitiless foes
Its homo- and bisexual characters are not magical emblems of ethical goodness for our edification; its men are not oversensitive metrosexuals in fur.
In avoiding such things, the show sidesteps the self-righteous and pompous tendency of some Hollywood productions to instruct us on how we should conduct our moral lives.
Secondly, Game of Thrones embraces its genre and uses it as a medium for expression.
It was the great philosopher Stanley Cavell who, in his books on Hollywood screwball comedies and melodramas, developed the notion that popular genres in the hands of great artists can be the source of extraordinary accomplishment. Game of Thrones – unlike other critically acclaimed shows such as Mad Men or Breaking Bad – fully revels in its fantasy genre.
More importantly, it draws on the familiar resources of the genre – the magic, the medieval brutality, the monarchical mania for power – in order to do something never achieved in the genre before – even, arguably, by the books. That is, it makes the search for meaning, particularly of those struggling for power and revenge, intelligible in dramatic and spectacular ways.
The threat of the White Walkers, the disintegration and murder of the families of the North, the corruption and debt of the Lannisters; competing religious faiths, one breeding evil the other a strange kind of solidarity and commitment to justice; it shows us what loyalty, lies and betrayal mean when the stakes are mortal not trivial.
Somehow we feel this speaks to our own search for meaning today, but not in an aversive way that suggest the writers have the cocky confidence to provide an answer.
Popular genres resonate in uncertain times
The unravelling of Westeros, as it is figured by some of the finest performances on screen today, resonates with a profound uncertainty about our relationship to our own history and future. And it is through genre and fiction that this intelligibility is achieved. Why? Because we cannot make sense of it, cannot feel its palpable weight for us, through other forms of discourse such philosophy, politics or science.
Indeed the great Hollywood directors of the 1940s and 50s all used popular genres in this way – think of John Ford’s westerns, Hitchcock’s thrillers, the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray and Max Ophuls.
None of that would matter much if it was executed poorly.
Veteran actors like Charles Dance, Liam Cunningham, Diana Rigg and Ciaran Hinds have never done better work; the standout contributions are Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion Lannister, Maisie Williams as Arya Stark and Aiden Gillan as Lord Baelish.
Dinklage communicates the shifting blend of family resentment with the wit of a well-read intellect. Williams uses her youth as a constant misdirection for her evolving capabilities as a killer. Gillan manages to pull off the feat of never being less than chillingly ahead of us in his political designs while allowing us to glimpse chinks of his interiority that almost humanises him.
A win for ‘complex TV’?
Finally, the credit for making Game of Thrones better than the rest of television must lie with Benioff and Weiss.
In a recent Conversation, piece Jason Mittell made the case for denoting the shift to more sophisticated television drama as part of the rise of “complex TV”, by which he meant narrative complexity enabled by “major shifts in the television industry, new forms of television technology, and the growth of active, engaged viewing communities.”
There are many problems with this notion of “complex TV”: as a criterion of achievement, “complexity” is a quality that is too broad to capture aesthetic specificities. Lots of complex things are quite unrewarding aesthetically – transport and sewerage systems for example. And complex narratives can be irritating, or over plotted.
But what is striking is the demotion, in Mittell’s account, of the creative achievement of individual artists who are given a perfunctory mention at the end of his piece. On the contrary. Without Weiss and Benioff, Game of Thrones would be just another disappointing adaptation – think Harry Potter films – of some fine genre writing.
The tendency of cultural and media studies over the past 20 years has been to avoid judgement and discrimination between the bad, the good and the better, by pretending that everything except the contribution of talented artists is important.
In the meantime, the leading artists of our time – such as David Milch (Deadwood), Matthew Weiner (Mad Men), Nic Pizzolatto (True Detective) and Weiss and Beinoff – have got on with the job of making great art for the masses. And herein lies one lesson that Game of Thrones can be said to offer us: without the talent and courage of individuals, no justice and, I would argue, no art, is feasible.
The first episode of the fifth season of Game of Thrones will screen in Australia on Monday April 13 in simulcast with the US launch. Details here.
- Jason Jacobs is head of the School of Communications and Arts at the University of Queensland.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
a plot makes for good story telling.
who would have thought?
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The plethora of tis and arse also helps
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In my opinion, the missing piece here is that Game of Thrones, Deadwood, Mad Men and True Detective (and House of Cards) simply LOOK better than any other TV due to the detail and depth of the sets, costumes, production design and cinematography. They create whole other worlds with amazing richness and seem authentic.
Shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad are the best ever because they rise above not really having all that, the writing and the performances are just of such a high calibre. (Although The Wire certainly creates a world foreign to most viewers and Breaking Bad did some great things with the camera).
Just my opinion though – thanks for the read!
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A good sprinkling of tits and arse on screen always helps too
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So why do network heads think we want a 17th season (whatever) of Master chef?
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@hodor, tis and arse, how very medieval of thee
i find it most unfair that i got beat up in high school for reading a song of ice and fire and now the same jackasses who did it are enthralled by this stupid tv show called, erroneously, game of thrones!
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Didn’t Shakespeare cover this ground already?
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The title of this piece is a massive sweeping statement.
Vikings is ten times better than GOT hands down.
The staging is smaller and better for it. There are less characters to follow but we get to know them better and to identify with them or not.
The lead characters are neither good nor bad but have tough codes to follow that lead to questionable acts.
None of the actors were stars or acting veterans before this show, so it does not have leg up that many such projects benefit from.
The men and women are portrayed as equally strong and capable. A necessary fact when the very survival of a group depends on everyone pitching in on everything.
The storylines are very well constructed and the dialogue is well written.
Vikings is the show to watch.
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“complex tv”
enuff said.
GOT is TV for those mourning MKR.
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GOT is tv for the unthinking masses.
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You’re both knobs and it is nowhere in the league of your sarcastic reply…. Its fantastic television. Go back to the ‘thinking man’s’ SBS – e.g – late night euro softcore.
You both sound like disgruntled dad’s!
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Agree with @Einar One Eye – Vikings is amazing! Better than GoT though, I’m not so sure..
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I’ve always found it interesting that even though “Game of Thrones” gets a lot of attention, for a long time “Duck Dynasty” was a more watched show on US cable. The most recent figures (that I found) show “GoT” in top position, but numbers 2, 3 and 4 are WWE Wrestling.
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.c.....15/388485/
It’s just something I keep in mind when people say things like, “It’s popular because it’s good!”, which is something that appears in a form within the article.
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