Yesterday I watched episode 2 of the final season of Game of Thrones with a bunch of my friends and we had a really good time. And we’re quite a mixed bunch of people. Some are geeks, some are not. Some have read the novels, some have not. But we all love the show and look forward to each new episode. And that’s what I would like to talk to you about this week. How did a show like GOT reach such a broad audience?
As you probably know, the Game of Thrones TV series is based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels. And back when I was young (80’s/90’s), fantasy novels had the same readers as comic books: nerds, geeks, social outcasts and weirdo’s. That may sound crude to younger people who are reading this, but that’s really how it was back then. “Cool” people didn’t read that kind of stuff and nobody wanted to make a TV show based on that kind of material. But now Game of Thrones is one of the most succesful TV shows ever.
How did this climate change so much? I think it has a lot to do with how the movie industry changed in the years before, starting in the early 2000’s. It was around this time that Hollywood realized that they should keep their movies closer to the source material. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings is a good example of this, but also superhero movies like X-Men, Spider-Man and Batman Begins. Before that, a lot of these stories and characters were changed a lot to appeal to a bigger audience. But that just made it bad. Die-hard fans didn’t like the movie adaptations of their favorite (comic)books and the mainstream crowd didn’t like it either, because the best parts were often taken out. But since the early 2000’s, fantasy and superhero stories suddenly became cool, even for people who had never read a book in their lives.
So that pretty much explains why HBO decided to do a TV show on George R.R. Martin’s popular series of novels. But how did it get as big as it is now? I guess that’s not just because of the fantasy setting (I consider it more Sword and Sorcery, but that’s a topic for another day). It’s also a lot of the adult content that makes it more appealing to a wider audience. They get away with so much sex, violence, swearing, nudity and even incest, rape and torture, because it’s “just fantasy”. But it’s stuf like that that gets people talking about it. Combine that with all the politics and some really well written characters and you’ve got a hit on your hands. Nowadays you’re the oddball at a party if you’ve never seen GOT, while that used to be the other way around.
Of course there are still a lot of people out there who don’t “get it” or won’t even watch it, because it’s a “fantasy show”. I get that a lot at work, where hardly anybody watches it. But it’s still cool to see that so many different people are enjoying a show like that. The folks I watch it with every week are mostly people I know from the bar where we all hang out on weekends. Ages range from mid twenties to early forties (me), we all have different lifestyles and hobbies and enjoy different music, but we all love Game of Thrones. So I hope we’re gonna get some spin-off shows or we’ll have to find something else to do on monday night 😉
Comic Geek 76 - My Thoughts On Comics and Pop Culture 