Fandom has become so troubling in so many ways since the advent of the Internet. People who are already fiercely protective of something they've read, seen, or listened to (even if they had nothing to do with that thing's creation) become even more so when an outside force seems prepared to tamper with it. When a popular book is turned into a movie or TV show, as goes the obvious example, the truly dedicated fans of the book become fervent devotees to every bit of news, from casting to set design to music. Some are devoted to saying that all the news stories, big or small, mean that the book's adaptation will be the best thing since sliced bread. The other half are usually there to deride each decision as an example of the adaptation's impending failure. Then the damn adaptation is released to the public, and something even worse happens: the general public, unfamiliar with the book, gets to deliver their even more diverse opinions.
Example: in episode 9 of the first of hopefully many seasons of Game of Thrones, HBO's latest and greatest drama, the ostensible good guy of the show, Lord Eddard, or Ned, Stark, potentially faces execution on false charges of treason. He's chosen to swear fealty to the current King of Westeros, the young King Joffrey. Joffrey is the son of the late King Robert Baratheon, but Ned has found more than enough evidence that proves Joffrey isn't Robert's son at all, but a product of incest between the Queen and her brother, a supposedly dashing knight. Ned doesn't really believe Joffrey is the true King, but to protect his family, he's willing to be exiled to the far North, where he'll spend the rest of his days as part of the Night's Watch, who guard Westeros from whatever may or may not lie beyond their Wall.
I know, for someone who's unfamiliar with the show, the preceding information may seem like too much to handle. (And believe me, reader, there's a lot more plot-heavy details where that came from.) I bring up all of that so you understand the vital element of the climactic scene in "Baelor": Ned has to swear fealty to the new King or get killed in front of a crowd hungry for blood. Now, we've all watched plenty of TV shows and movies. We know the way things work in terms of building suspense. A character may get killed; that seems inherently suspenseful. But when I tell you that Ned is played by Sean Bean, formerly of the Lord of the Rings series, among others, you may assume that Ned's going to be safe. Why wouldn't you? Bean is the most recognizable actor in the show's cast, and the marketing for the show has centered around him. Also, as I said earlier, his character is the closest there is to a pure good guy on this show. (That, despite his having fathered a child with someone who isn't his wife.) Ned's going to be fine. But when Ned swears fealty, the snotty young King twists things around; as the King, he won't ever let treason go unpunished. Despite the confusion that reigns around him, Joffrey's demand is not unheeded. Ned soon loses his head, and plenty of viewers who'd never read the books and avoided the spoilers within, according to the media, went as crazy as the crowd in the show.
There were cries that people wouldn't watch the show anymore, because they had apparently forced themselves to watch 9 hours of television for one actor, despite his being one of many, many characters on the show. Now, I don't doubt that some people did actually think they'd give it up, but honestly, those people weren't watching the show for the right reasons. I've only read the first book in the series (the next three are in my house, staring me in the face, but I've yet to power through the second installment), but I was very confident that the HBO series, developed and written almost entirely by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, would do a more than adequate job of bringing the book to the small screen. I picked up the first four books after the series was announced, and saw how simple it would be to make each book at least one season of a television series. The Song of Ice and Fire series, written by George R.R. Martin, is absolutely epic, but Martin's prior work in television shows, as most of the chapters in the book, which are all POV from eight characters, are structured like back-to-back scenes in a serialized drama. Martin made wise choices in writing characters like Tyrion Lannister, Ned Stark, Sansa Stark, and Jon Snow, not only in creating singular human beings, but in subverting a lot of fantasy-novel tropes. Bringing them to further life, Benioff and Weiss managed to subtly define Game of Thrones as its own entity with ease and an appropriate amount of caution.
I don't know that Game of Thrones is ever going to succeed in making me forget that scenes added specifically for the show didn't originate in the book, but what's been added, taken out, or altered for dramatic purposes rarely seems forced or unnecessary. Something that does seem a bit unique to the TV version is its continued reliance on something Myles McNutt of Cultural Learnings has deemed "sexposition," meaning a scene where characters are having sex or watching someone have sex, solely so they can deliver an info-dump of a monologue. I don't know that every episode featured one of these moments, but I'd bet that more than half of the episodes did. The finale included such a moment, when Grand Maester Pycelle, a supposedly doddering wise man who sits on the King's Council, talks about what makes a true king after apparently having sex with a prostitute named Ros, who has clearly heard such ravings before. These scenes, it's been argued, are just here to maintain a level of titillation for the audience members who only want to see fantasy TV shows where clothing is optional.
To clarify, I was less offended than I was distracted, never more so than during a scene where the devious Petyr Baelish, known as Littlefinger, was watching two prostitutes in the brothel he owned having sex while essentially telling us all about his childhood. On the one hand, as a fan of the HBO series Deadwood, I'm not against scenes where we learn about characters' motivations or histories while having sex. That show had a famous first-season scene where saloon owner Al Swearengen was describing his dark past as he received oral sex, something that helped solidified that show's legendary status for me. The reason that scene works and the scene with Littlefinger didn't is because the sex didn't seem like a natural part of the scene; instead, we were watching, as was he, two ladies get it on, because--hey, look, it's two ladies getting it on, OK?
Despite the sometimes gratuitous nature of these scenes, Game of Thrones, from its first scene to the last shot of the season finale, was an exciting, darkly escapist journey. The basic story is that Ned Stark gets entangled with the political machinations of the country of Westeros when his old friend, King Robert, asks him to be the king's right-hand man. Ned is too decent, too driven by his sense of honor to realize that he's descending slowly, but surely, into a pit of vipers, led by people such as Queen Cersei, who only wants her family, the Lannisters, to rule all of Westeros. The Starks' feud with the Lannisters exacerbates over the season, especially once Ned's wife, Catelyn, takes Cersei's brother Tyrion (known as the Imp, since he's a dwarf) prisoner. Tyrion, it turns out, may have tried to murder Catelyn's second youngest son, Bran. Bran was unlucky enough to see Cersei and her other brother, Jaime, having sex; all this gets him is paralyzed, once Jaime pushes him out a window to keep his secret. Once Tyrion is taken prisoner, the Lannister patriarch gets involved and declares war, just as Ned tries to maintain the appropriate bloodline to the throne so Cersei's illicit son, Joffrey, doesn't get to take the throne after King Robert dies in a potentially mysterious fashion.
Like I said before, there's a whole hell of a lot of plot in this show. Benioff, Weiss, and the scant few writers who contributed to the first season had a delicate balancing act to keep up. Unlike the books, which include plenty of inner monologues to complement the twists and turns, the TV series had to do a lot of work to keep the characters as important as the story they were living. While not every effort was perfect, as the season continued, it became clear that this show knew exactly what it was doing. The performances on the show, from the big names like Bean or Peter Dinklage as Tyrion, to younger actors like Maisie Williams and Emilia Clarke. Clarke, in particular, had one of the most challenging roles in the show, partly because of how separate she is from the main action.
Clarke plays Daenerys Targaryen, the daughter of the man who used to be King, the late King Aerys. Aerys was overthrown by King Robert, who fears that Daenerys and her scheming brother, Viserys, will try to overthrow Robert and take back their rightful place in Westeros. Viserys plans on doing just this, by marrying his sister off to the head of a savage army, which will descend on Westeros and help him become King. Of course, things don't go as they're supposed to, mostly because Daenerys, who begins the series as a frightened, shy, and weak young girl, grows into a strong and powerful woman at the side of her husband, Khal Drogo of the Dothraki tribe. In the beginning, she is tossed around as a piece of meat, but when she reclaims, in no small way, the sigil of her family (the dragon), it's truly thrilling to watch. Clarke sells this transformation and this character as well as anyone else on the show. (Keep in mind, on the face of it, Dinklage steals every scene he's in, as he clearly relishes having such a fun, clever character to play.)
Salon's TV critic, Matt Zoller Seitz, argued earlier this week that Game of Thrones' first season was the best first season of any show since the first season of Deadwood. At first, I paused at this assertion, but the more I think about it, the more it seems clear that there are really only a few shows that began airing since 2004 that could claim to have had an incredibly strong first season. I'm not sure that the first season of Mad Men couldn't easily win this argument, but then again, I haven't that show's inaugural season since it aired, so I'd have to go back and reconsider it. (Boy, that would be a fun experiment. That might just happen, folks.) As it stands, Game of Thrones began as an enormously ambitious series, possibly the most ambitious dramatic undertaking on American television. When its first season ended this past Sunday, it stood as a major milestone in TV history: an adaptation whose scope exceeds all other shows and most movies that managed to exceed all expectations. That is, unless you were only interested in watching Sean Bean.
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