By Jared Free
When the last episode of Game of Thrones (GoT) aired in June, an era ended. Over the last decade, the show amassed a huge following, bringing fantasy storytelling into the center of the public consciousness in a way we haven’t seen in years. But the entertainment world is much different now than it was when Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings dominated the box office in the aughts – the internet has forever changed how we interact with television.
I jumped on the GoT wagon just before the third season premiered. After devouring the first two seasons in a mostly sleepless weekend, the few weeks wait for new episodes felt brutally cruel. But after the end of the third season saw the violent murder of my two favorite characters, I missed that fortnight of blissful ignorance.
To keep myself from being blindsided again, I decided to take up the books, and was struck by the sometimes small but always significant distinctions between the written and visual versions of the story. Daenerys especially was a key difference. By now, enough think pieces and hot takes have been written about her reversal from hero to villain, so I’ll keep my own short. The key problem with the series’ presentation of the Unburnt has two majors that we lost insight into what she was thinking during all of her most iconic moments, so what was often on the page a (pretty) young woman posturing to stake her claim became a (very) grown woman, for lack of a better word, owning her shit on-screen. Because we were seeing the world through her eyes, as a reader, we had access to the cracks in the façade, but as viewers all we saw was the façade.
And of course, viewers loved it! Dany was a beautiful, sexual, empowered and powerful woman. But this is where the changing nature of media engagement comes into play — there are powerful currents of live feedback on media, especially television, that have begun to shape the way people write those tv shows. The showrunners and writers on Game of Thrones saw the incredible response to George R.R. Martin’s plot twists and Dany’s fire breathing moments and gave us more of the same. Unfortunately, they did this without an apparent endgame, and without consideration for how leaning into non-textual influences would change the very core of the show.
I personally stopped watching sometime in the fifth season because I saw that GoT had stopped being a show grounded in a brutal world populated by people that I care about, and became a brand that put the desires of its fanbase over the needs of its story. But when the end was nigh, I binged and caught back up to see the world and people that I loved off. The biggest change that I noticed between early and later seasons is an apparent lack of thoughtfulness. It is nigh impossible to replicate the depth of detail that Martin goes into in his later books, though, so this is not entirely the showrunners’ fault. In my opinion, the scope of the story got away from Martin himself, and the books began to suffer as well. But Martin builds the books, brick by brick, not reverse engineering major plot points. So, when they had to wrap it all up in fourteen episodes, it understandably backfired, leaving new and old fans frustrated.
Game of Thrones was a game changer for epic, plotted television storytelling. Its successes were huge, but its failures were just as so. I hope that as we move further and further into the streaming world writers and creators learn from its mistakes, and don’t repeat them.
