Game Of Thrones And Getting Bored With Your Own Franchise

     

    Game of Thrones is a very special series to me, I've been watching it every year since season four came out. I can't even describe how devastated I was over the last two seasons and how bad they were, it felt like a waste of many years of investment and, for a while, I cast that dislike over the entire show and thought I wasn't into any of it because the last two seasons left such a bad taste in my mouth. 

    Now, after a long time of reflection and a rewatch of the earlier seasons, I realize that I still very much love Game of Thrones. The production design, visual effects, casting, story, pacing, everything is done so exceptionally well that it puts most Hollywood movies to shame. It essentially ruined any other kind of medieval-themed show for me since they all look cheap and fake in comparison. I still love most of the characters and plotlines and the show is structured in such a brilliant way where it doesn't spend too much time per episode on a single character. This makes it very easy and enjoyable to watch despite the density of the story.

    It is a very impressive feat that the writers managed to pull off; make the viewer interested in a giant, complicated world full of like twenty main characters who are all in some way related to one another and tons of political intrigue all in the first episode and maintain that intrigue and complexity throughout the show while also making it digestible. This combined with the unparalleled production, craftsmanship, and performances all made for a cultural phenomenon that dominated television in a way not many shows ever have. It is easily as significant if not more so than HBO's own The Sopranos was back in the day. Even now multiple shows are trying to capitalize off of the success by making their own dark fantasy-inspired television series that have a distinct Game of Thrones feel to them (see Netflix’s The Witcher and Amazon's upcoming Lord of the Rings). 

    So what the hell happened? Well, the simple answer is, Weiss and Benioff (showrunners and the lead writers) got bored. Many watchers dismiss their talent because of the last two seasons and say that they simply lacked the creative direction of George R.R. Martin's books since the show surpassed them in the timeline at this point, but I do not believe this to be the entire story. They showed themselves to be brilliant at adapting a complex work for a television format, and past season four of the show, they have strayed further and further away from the books while maintaining most of the quality. The quality nosedived not because they ran out of material; there is more to it than that.

    I have read all five of Martin's books and the dip in quality is present there as well and I would like to propose that the issues people see with the show are also present in the source material. A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons, which are books four and five respectively, have little to do with the show adaptation beyond just some of the basic narrative beats. Those two books in particular are what put me off Martin's writing; they are incredibly self-indulgent, incoherent, and dull unlike the first three. A Feast for Crows is nearly one thousand pages long and little of the content in it has even been adapted into the show because, well, nothing really happens. I have a hard time even recalling what it was about but I remember that, again, not much of the book's content ever found its way into the show. 

    The first three books are very focused, full of drama and twists, and are very close to what goes on in the first four or so seasons of the show. They are what most people probably think the books are like when they complain about the last two seasons, which is simply not the case. The first four seasons are widely regarded as the best and the fact that they adapt mostly the first three books is a testament to how good they are. The last two I had a genuinely hard time even getting through; so many of the chapters I feel would add nothing to the overall narrative or characters and were more just the meandering ramblings of a writer who isn't as passionate about his work anymore. 

    I see this as a reflection of Martin himself losing interest in his own story, early signs of what would eventually happen to the show. As the show went on, it got more and more distant from the source material and the relationship between the writers and Martin himself waned as a result. This can be seen in just the fact that Martin stopped writing scripts for the show after season four and infamously doesn't speak of it much in interviews. This disinterest from both Martin and Weiss and Benioff manifested differently and is reflective of the mediums they exist in. Martin's work became more dull and unfocused, while the show became more action-focused and, for lack of a better word, dumb. They were still attempting to make a commercially successful product while also being disinterested in the material, while Martin has less of a concern for that and his medium enables a lot more self-indulgence than a big-budget production. The two went in the opposite directions creatively; the books not having enough plot to justify the length and incoherence, and the show having too few episodes that were all very rushed in terms of the pacing.

    This creative boredom with the property combined with them just wanting to work on something else has bled into how different those last two seasons are from the rest of the show. Gone is the political intrigue, deep character development, or lengthy dialogue sections, in favour of having a giant dragon fly around fighting ice zombies. Again, so many people dismiss this as simply them not understanding what Game of Thrones is, but I do not believe this to be the case. Yes, they did have more source material to adapt for the good seasons of the show but adaptation is not merely a translation from book to screen. They made many good creative choices to make the material work on the screen and really understood what made the books tick, which is evident in the excellent first four seasons. Seasons five and six did stumble more as they deviated further from the books, but they still felt like the same show and did not have the major issues of seven and eight. The production, performances, and technical aspects of seven and eight were outstanding and even surpassed the prior seasons, but the creative core of it was tossed and forgotten. 

    I've mulled this over in my head for years as I have come to terms with my feelings about Game of Thrones and I believe it to be a fascinating example of creatives simply getting tired of working on one project for such a long time and it really coming through in the work itself. Oftentimes, people forget that there are real, flawed people behind great works of art. I do too, but Game of Thrones is one of the biggest examples where understanding that real people are behind a project even as massive as this is key to understanding why the show and the books are the way that they are.