Game of Thrones, Season 8 (spoilers allowed)

This is correct, but it's fans get REAL big mad if you say this.

One of the things that I admire about The Sopranos is David Chase did not do fan service. He did not bring back the Russian, as a good example.

It's ok for Thrones to be pulp TV. Yes has had good acting, and yes having a sprawling cast over so many locations is a remarkable feat. It's mostly a good show with good character arcs!

It's also ok that it steps on its dick a lot, and is often dumb when it's trying to be smart.

 

What I like about Game of Thrones is that I don't have to go to Reddit to read a bunch of conspiracy theories and explanations of what the hell is going on. Which is why I'm giving up on Westworld, because as beautiful as a show as that is, I have no fucking idea what's happening. Game of Thrones is what it is, for the most part. And that's fine.

 

This is true to a degree. It's not a show like Westworld that has lots of deeper meaning and makes a big statement on society. But while it is in a way pulp TV, it's pulp TV taken to the grandest level imaginable.

No television show before it had ever created a world on the scale of Game of Thrones with the intertwined politics and backstories. None of the "greatest TV shows ever" have approached the kind of scope of the continuing, intertwined narratives in Game of Thrones. None have had the level of visual artistry.

Don't get me wrong. There are shows with better acting. There are shows with great writing. There are shows with better directing overall (though I would argue some single episodes of GoT have some of the best directing in television history, and the first 20-some minutes of "Winds of Winter" are 20 of the best minutes in television history).

But Game of Thrones is a different beast. It's easy to compare The Wire to Breaking Bad to The Sopranos to Mad Men. The details are different, but the shows fit in a similar dramatic mold. It's much more difficult to judge those next to a show like Game of Thrones, where the show is as much about telling an overarching, epic story as anything else. Game of Thrones attempted something no television show had ever tried, and it pulled it off to a startling degree of success.

 

Westworld is one of those that you have to watch each episode two or three times just to understand what happened in it. I simply don't have the time to invest in that. It wasn't as tough to follow its first season.

 

Remember, the wire, sopranos, breaking bad, etc. are tv shows based on real people to an extent in that the settings are real world.

GOT is based on a book that already was popular and in the first season played almost exactly like said book. The grand epic was built in.

 

One last thing about this, and then hopefully we’re all done with this.

 

Good point.

It is the GOAT at the water cooler, but not among the professional critics.

 

Both the books and the show begin with a White Walker attack. If it was never mainly about the battle with the Night King, that was a poor choice.

 

Wouldn't be the only poor writing choice Martin has ever made.

 

I'm to the point that there is damn little that is "Appointment TV" any longer. Generally only sporting events and the Sunday morning political shows qualify, and few of those are "must see TV" for me. GoT heads that list. I was reading GRR Martin before GoT, and I got on it almost immediately when it came out in paperback in 1993 or so. So many excellent and beloved SF/Fantasy books have been adapted into shitty movies and TV shows, and I feared for GoT, HBO or not. As the hype built and the production info hit the news, I became less fearful and more hopeful. I can't think of many such properties that have been as well executed. Sure, it's a little flat in places, and it takes plotlines that were threaded through the book over hundreds of pages and turns them into a twenty minute segment, making wholesale editing of the story necessary. It still delivers. It's not High Art, but for mass consumption fantasy it sets a very high bar indeed.

Here's a particularly dark and twisted bit of Martin's work, "Sandkings". It won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for Novella in 1980, and has nothing whatsoever to do with sword and sorcery fantasy. It's only fifteen pages or so, and does a magnificent job of world building and creeping you out in so few pages.

https://forwearemany.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/sandkings.pdf

 

The attack helps establish the setting. It also leads into a very early demonstration of Ned Stark's character, and much of the early part of the story revolves around him.

 

This is an excellent analysis of where GoT has gone wrong and made weak choices, which has particularly become obvious over seasons 7 and 8. Some of this has come up as comments above, some is new and well observed. In a general sense, once they ran out of Martin's books to play off of, the showrunners made a number of poor choices in plot and characterization. This has led to the minimization and misuse of players like Tyrion, Varys, and Melisandre.

"Unfortunately, for the sake of building up battles and putting Arya, Sansa, Daenerys, and Jon Snow in the spotlight, the puppetmasters pulling the strings have been cut off. The resulting simplicity is a blow to a longform story that likely wouldn’t have commanded this much attention if it had always been this uninterested in its undercard players. Stories as varied as Westworld, Avengers: Endgame, and Naruto bring in audiences with the sense of grandmasters playing 4D chess with the world. Exchanging that for easy thrills and sleight-of-hand tricks feels like a quick, boring victory after a long, worthy buildup."

Game of Thrones has no idea what to do with its geniuses