Television Of The Weak: I'd Totally Watch A Living Single Remake, But Only For Like Six Years

This week, Tim O'Neil goes two episodes deep into the just-started Game of Thrones while Tucker goes two episodes back into the just-finished Justified.

Game of Thrones: "Winter Is Coming" and "The Kingsroad"
Tim O'Neil

 

(This is part two of a two part discussion of Game of Thrones. The first part can be found at The Hurting, here.)

The pull quote for Game of Thrones - or leastwise the pull quote that HBO very dearly wishes to see adopted by an unwitting media - is that the series is "The Sopranos with swords." That this description is more or less accurate does not necessarily redound to the credit of the series. The Sopranos was a deeply flawed show that used a number of fairly sophisticated storytelling techniques to mask the fact the it was yet another iteration of the same old mob tropes we'd seen reiterated by Hollywood ten thousand times before. It doesn't matter how badly we see the bad guy dragged through the mud, and how "problematic" their life is and how their ethical bankruptcy effects their families - at the end of the day we still feel that rush of adrenaline when he pops some guy in the head because he's out protagonist, and we're hardwired to reward our protagonists with unearned and sycophantic loyalty. Inverting genre tropes, no matter how cleverly done, is still just another excuse to trot out the tropes. We think we're safe because the meta elements and supposed ironic detachment provide some degree of ethical prophylaxis, but really we're still just as complicit with Tony Soprano as we were with Tony Montana.

I can't help but feel a similar sort of sinking dissatisfaction while watching Game of Thrones. This is supposed to be the state-of-the-art in the fantasy genre, and yet it still seems very familiar. What do we have to show for the supposedly mature level of storytelling on display? Political intrigue and sex. We'll discuss the politics first, because that would appear to be the story's primary hook (although the sex is getting quite a bit of attention as well). The seriousness with which the production tackles the material argues in itself for a kind of respectability that reflexively places the material above the level of "mere" fantasy, with wizards and magic and paladins and orcs. But I strongly suspect that for all the intrigue and lust on display, the series will live or die on the alacrity with which it finally delivers on the (implicit) promise of merciless and magical medieval action. Will viewers stick around for a fantasy series that does not - or, because of its obeisance to its source material, cannot - deliver on the promise of a more fantastic spectacle? No matter how nuanced a character (the producers would like us to believe) Tony eventually became, it was still the promise of violence, grimy immorality and gallows humor that put butts in the seats on HBO for the better part of a decade.

The story of Game of Thrones focuses on the machinations of the royal families of a group of interlocking yet competing fiefdoms under the ostensible rule of a strong central king. All the houses jockey for power relative to the throne, with the ultimate goal of any family being (presumably) the usurpation of central authority. This is the kind of story filled with characters for whom the adjective "Machiavellian" was certainly coined. And yet it's hard to feel sympathy for any characters in this undifferentiated mass of political schemers when they're all feudal aristocrats: they're all complicit in a system that normalizes exploitation. Are we supposed to root for the good princes who love dogs and have cute children over the bad princes who have the children of menial's whipped to death for the temerity of speaking to royalty? They are all symptoms of a sick system, and seeing as we're not Aristotle the only way to differentiate between "good" kings and "bad" kings is that the bad kings are still breathing. But given the complete lack of any non-aristocratic (or non military) characters in these first two episodes I seriously doubt we're building towards any kind of proletarian revolution, or even just a moderate expansion of the political franchise.

Everyone knows that Machiavelli wrote The Prince, but how many people have ever read his Discourses on Livy? Machiavelli was a dyed-in-the-wool (small "r") republican who devoted his life to promoting political freedom throughout Italy. The Prince was (depending on which scholars you believe) either pitch-black satire or a bald-facedly cynical attempt to ingratiate himself with the same Medici's who broke both of his arms for (supposedly) conspiring against Florence. There is a whole world of political thought and ethical theory outside the realm of musclebound noblemen jockeying against one and another for the privilege of pissing on the poor.

And the sex . . . yes. There is a lot of sex in this show. All that can be said, I think, is that any filmmaker wishing to convey the seriousness and grotesquery of forced marriage and rape should not film rape scenes like outtakes from a porn film. If you don't want people to second-guess the prurient intent of your rape scenes, you should film them to be as unarousing as possible - you know, actually unpleasant, and not lit by soft candles in a cozy tent or set against a backdrop of waves crashing against the setting sun. I know I go back to this example a lot, but really, if we're talking about rape on film we should be talking about Salo. If you want to make the audience hate rape and detest rapists, there are ways to do this - but the methods necessary to truly convey the monstrousness of sexual violence on film are perhaps too astringent for pay cable. So instead we get this sub-Nancy Friday royal rape fantasy bullshit.

I like fantasy, but I am strangely unmoved by Game of Thrones selective obeisance to the mores of epic fantasy storytelling. Every "mature" element is undercut by another concession made to convention. Sex and politics, yes, but we're still ultimately in a world of royalist power fantasies buttressed by parochial notions of clan ethics. It reminds me more than a little of Geoff Johns' insistence on filling Green Lantern comics with dismemberment and blood - it's Green Lantern, for fuck's sake. The gore doesn't convince anyone that it's all grown up now. At the end of the day people still want to see dudes with green wishing rings fight evil space robots. I can't help but think that Game of Thrones might not be just a bit more interesting if we actually saw some monsters and dragons. I have been promised by people "in the know" that these elements are coming, eventually. In the meantime, we're left to struggle through a fantasy series for people who really, really wanted to know more about the foreign policies of Rohan and Gondor in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Númenor. If you don't know that that means, trust me, it would be as boring as it sounds.

Will I ever pick up the books? Believe it or not, even despite my general lack of enthusiasm for the show, I am seriously considering it. It's not so much that I would specifically like to see if my complaints regarding the show are addressed or mollified by the books (I have a hard time thinking the rape is anywhere near as sensationalistic in the books as on film, for instance). I would like to see if the stories themselves in their original unexpurgated form are strong enough to make me not care about all the little problems that make the TV show such a frustrating viewing experience. That's the strength of a well-told fantasy story, after all: it sucks you in despite yourself, it convinces you to buy into the most fantastical premise despite your better judgment, to surrender your willing suspension of disbelief to the custody of a master storyteller, to sign on to the cause of crown and kingdom and fight to the death against the incarnations of absolute evil. I dearly cherish that experience, when I manage to find it.

Justified "Reckoning" & "Bloody Harlan"
Tucker Stone 

While the first season of Justified had problems finding its preferred format, playing the long form familial conflict arcs interrupted by done-in-one Raylan-gets-his-gun set pieces that varied in quality, the show was one of those rare beasts that arrived as close to perfect as it could be, considering it's hysterical line-up of cliches. (The least of which would be the fact that it's a show about a fast-draw lawman who wears a hat, has a crusty old boss who just can't get him to behave, a couple of woman who just can't help but love him, and the most of which that the show never stopped coming up with reasons why it's demonically attractive lawman never found a room he couldn't take off his shirt in.) The first season, it was a show that knew exactly what it was supposed to do, even if sometimes it didn't exactly know how. By the close of that ragtag collection of episodes, there'd been a couple of solid done-in-ones (Alan Ruck's turn as a doomed dentist was my personal favorite), and one of the most satisfying season finales in what's rapidly become the primary warhorse in the FX garage, the pulp machodrama. Justified isn't the Shield--there's just never going to be enough on the line for it to reach that show's grueling final years, and despite the winning presence of Walt Goggins and the incomparable genius of Nick Searcy, Justified's back bench of acting talent is so slim as to be nonexistent--but Justified was a solid contender to back up Sons of Anarchy, a show so lurid that it's probably best described as the hangover after sleaze decides to go and get black out drunk.

If it seems like this is leading up to a claim that Justified has lost its way a bit, that would be because it seems an inarguable claim to make...and yet?

Few seem to think so. Those who had once given the show only the most wavering support seem to have now fully given over to this weird, Frankenstein narrative it's spent the last three months farting out, and the regularity with which the show gets named as Breaking Bad's only competition for best child of the Holy Trinity (Shield/Wire/Deadwood) is so consistent as to be expected. (While remaining completely inaccurate.) Simply put, the show's been bad--at times, it was bad because it brought on a why's-he-still-working guy like Larenz Tate and then gave him the stupidest lines in the show's history (regarding a cheap stuffed animal, which was covered in blood) and had him deliver these lines to an actor who's only saving grace might be that he's young enough that it's totally possible that he could grow into being a better actor than Larenz Tate, and other times the show was bad because of how little it seemed to care about the characters it had spent the first season building (have any of Eva's choices made sense this season? If you didn't already know that Boyd's character was intended to die back in the series premiere, wouldn't you have guessed it by the way he rockets around in motivation and design?), but most of all, the show was bad because of what it spent an entire season consistently dismantling, which was Raylen Givens, it's heart and soul.

There's a scene in "Bloody Harlan" where Jeremy Davies--who's Miller's Crossing inspired performance in last week's "Reckoning" was one of this season's rare high points--beats on Raylen with a baseball bat. It's an uncomfortable scene to watch, and not because of its reliance on the show's commitment to that odd juxtaposition of graphic violence and rural outdoor settings. It's an uncomfortable scene because Raylen sort of deserves to get knocked around, because he's not that good of a guy.

A quick aside: I'm not someone who personally cares that much if characters on a television show are "likeable" or not, although I do consider that to be a factor in whether I can enjoy a reality show. Fictional though, the only thing I ask is that they be consistent, whatever they are. Consistency is how someone as selfish and self-obsessed as McNulty becomes watchable, how a character as darkly horrifying as Shane Vendrell becomes tragic. Raylen's problem isn't that he's no longer likeable--if anything, Olyphant's ability to give the show's leaden dialog such a charming lilt has become a constant saving grace--it's that he no longer makes sense from the long view, and that means everything he does correlates to where he is in the moment. And where is that, but a bottomless pit of self-created destruction? Would the guy who swore oaths in Miami to clean up cities in the face of annihilation have assisted his fickle ex-wife after discovering the chasms of dishonesty that existed behind her petulant manipulations, only to carry on in hotels with random mining executives a scant few days later? Does his arrogant (and consistently fruitless) disdain for his boss, his partners, his family, even the law itself have any consistent connection to the never compromise hunter who laid it down in the desert so many times when Miami's shooters came calling? The guy that season built--a classically structured archetype, a gunslinging maverick built of honor--was turned into something else this season, a dressed up in tight jeans piece of white trash, only different from the Bennett family he fought in that they never turned on one another, while Raylen couldn't be trusted to even tell his friends the truth. In the end, he betrayed them all.

That deserves a couple of licks, at least.

-Tim O'Neil & Tucker Stone, 2011

 

Comments

[Harvey Jerkwater]

While I haven't seen the show, I've read about three-quarters of the book "Game of Thrones," and came away finding it less impressive than its fans would have me believe. It's not bad, but it has key weaknesses that prevent it from being good.

Part of it Tim nails here absolutely: it's very much a standard issue fantasy world, with the magic turned way down and more of a focus on the medieval noble-house politics, though the politics are wholly of the fantasy novel variety, rather than historical. (The series uses the Wars of the Roses as a very rough template -- Starks and Lannisters, ahem -- but it's very rough.) This does not automatically make it sophisticated.

Moreover, that stuff tends to be boring as crap unless one of two conditions are met:

1. The otherworldly aspect of the story comes out to amaze us. Wizards, dragons, rapping elves, etc. "Game of Thrones," at least the three-quarters that I read, had none of these, aside from a prologue chapter and some dragon skulls near the end. Magic is a distant threat, not a present reality. Present reality is Standard Fantasy Kingdom, with a bit more focus on the grubbiness and cruelty of it all. Nothing interesting by itself.

That's okay, though, because the second condition would be even better to meet, and would make the books excellent.

2. Interesting, human, rounded characters. Alas, no. With one exception, all of the characters are exactly what they appear to be the second you meet them. "Good and Noble" Eddard Stark is just that. The assumptions you make about him from his first appearance in the book prove to be dead on, and that's true of basically everyone. The whole book is populated with stock characters: the Tomboy, the Scheming Adulteress, the Spoiled Psycho Prince(s), the Big Brother, etc. Not one of them does anything that contradicts or even broadens their stock role. (The only exception is a minor one, the faux-Genghis Khan, who showed a second side. Not great stuff, but better than nothing.)

What makes the book so tiresome is that the only way the plot can move is to throw the characters at each other in new combinations or circumstances, and without the characters demonstrating variation or development beyond the stock paths of their types, I ceaseed to give a crap.

A common reader complaint with the series is that Martin keeps introducing more and more characters, rather than sticking with the main ones. But it makes complete sense, given the writing. There's only so much he can do with any given character, so to keep the story moving, he has to throw in more.

If you aren't going to make with the crazy fantasy novel whammies ("Dragons from the sky! Tantric sex wizards raising armies of the damned! Gnomes with skateboards!"), and you aren't going to stock the book with rounded characters, and you're going to stick to basic fantasy tropes, well, shit, what's the point? All that kept me going for the last hundred pages or so before I gave up was curiosity about what would happen next. But the book proved slow and predictable, and I gave up.

(The "shocking ending" to the novel -- which I predicted early on and confirmed via the internet -- is only shocking if you've never read a fantasy series before. Reader tip: if a multi-volume series begins with a father and his kids, and the kids are important characters themselves, and the father isn't the villain, *he's going to die before the end of the book.* The kids will be the heroes of the series, and the father's death will be necessary to place them in peril. This is such a tired trope that I can't believe how many internet people expressed shock over it happening again in GOT.)

It's not incompetent, but it's not great stuff either. I set down the first novel with about eighty pages to go and a sense of minor disappointment. It's a standard genre exercise with much more of a brain than usual and decent execution, but it lacks the fizz and pop of trashy fantasy and it lacks the insights and subtleties of literature, so it just kinda sits there.

The TV version at least has nudity and gives Peter Dinklage work, so I'm behind that.

[DerikB]

In re your comments on Game of Thrones and it's political system.

I've been watching HBO's Rome series, which works from a similar perspective. Almost everyone is a noble and slaves are ubiquitous. Even the poorer of the protagonists have them. Yet, one thing I find interesting about the series is the way it puts you into this very different system of politics and morals. A system where we can see the problems, but the series isn't spending a lot of time moralizing about it. It really doesn't need to.

With Game of Thrones, so far, I don't get that similar sense, because the non-nobles are so absent from attention. There isn't that casual background of others in most of the scenes. It's just the nobles talking to each other about being nobles.

[James]

@Harvey Jerkwater

While the first book might borrow heavily from standard fantasy tropes, the following books depart quite often. The kids are most certainly not the heroes of the following books, at this point in the series, most are either dead or in no position to even conceive of avenging them.

[zack soto]

@harvey-
Wow, that's a real _dick move_ of a spoiler! Jesus.

@tucker & tim-
That's what I love about this site. Just recently I was thinking "man, tucker used to write about tv a lot, what about that shit?" And here is this post! So in true TFO tradition, you turn up skewering things I like, but I enjoy reading the critique anyway.
GoT less than Justified, but still tv I've been enjoying.

[Tim O'Neil]

Tucker had given up on talking about TV. I had to climb to the top of the tallest mountain in New York State, where he had established a quiet zen hermitage with no electronic devices of any kind allowed. He spent most days in quiet prayer and meditation, rising with the sun to work in his garden and subsisting only on vegetables he grew and donations from the village farmers in the valley below.

I knocked on his gate but there was no answer. It was unlocked so I entered the garden and found him sitting erect in the lotus position.

"It is time," I said, "you must return."

"I have given up the ways of television, old friend," he replied. "I cannot return to that life."

"You must. The world needs you, now more than ever."

"I made a solemn vow never again to watch television."

"But, you do not understand - Justified was terrible this year."

He said nothing for many minutes. His eyes opened wide and he seemed to be looking at a point on the far horizon, a point far beyond any I could see with my own vision. There was a cold wind, suddenly, slicing through my clothes and seemingly into my very soul.

"Alright," he said, finally, regrettably. He lowered his head, this gesture a mixture of weariness and resolve. His voice was soft and hard, like the rustling of ancient parchment. He shifted his shoulders, as if assuming once again a great and terrible weight.

"Shit just got real."

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

"And yet it's hard to feel sympathy for any characters in this undifferentiated mass of political schemers when they're all feudal aristocrats"

Well, there's a lot of canonical literature with protagonists whose existence is predicated on an economic and/or political exploitation which is mostly unquestioned. From a quick glance at the bookshelf: Homer, Plato, Ariosto, Spenser, Malory, much of Shakespeare, Austen, Tolstoy, Proust etc. etc. I enjoy reading about Bertie Wooster, even though he'd be first to the wall when the revolution comes.

Obviously, Martin isn't in the same class as these folks; he's not even in the same school. But, even so, not every one has to be Brecht, you know?

Anyway, at least the GoT books are free of that Tolkien horseshit about the noble blood that courses through Aragorn's veins and gives him the divine right to rule. And there actually is a lot of proley stuff later on in GoT.

[Cole Moore Odell]

David Chase on his audience:

"The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people's alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ''justice.'' They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly. But these people have always wanted blood. Maybe they would have been happy if Tony had killed twelve other people. Or twenty-five people. Or, who knows, if he had blown up Penn Station. The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted his blood, after cheering him on for eight years."

You write about The Sopranos as if the problematic nature of Tony as protagonist was a bug rather than a feature. I've always assumed that Chase was fully aware of the complicity you talk about and at least thought he was in control of it, using it (justifiably or not) to contemptuously critique his audience's hypocrisy.

I also have trouble getting my head around your assertion that consciously playing with tropes is ultimately no different than straightforwardly employing the tropes themselves. Therefore, Watchmen is the same as the comics it purports to comment on, just Moore & Gibbons's excuse to trot out sensationalistic super violence under a tricked-up veneer. The Larry Sanders Show is just another tired sitcom. Really?

[James W]

Probably naivety on my part, but I couldn't believe that a contemporary - and acclaimed! - fantasy series was gonna pull the Lusty Brown Barbarian shit. They're STILL doing that? And his rape victim could not have been paler, blonder, blue-eyed-er! Again, I'm told that the Dothrakis in the books are more nuanced (if only slightly), but given what I know of where this story thread goes, I don't see the TV show ever being able to claw its way back from that introduction. Crazy.

Peter Dinklage spends half his time being hilarious because he's a funny actor and the script is pretty good, and the other half being hilarious because of his terrible - TERRIBLE - English accent.

[moose n squirrel]

I stick by what I said in the original thread on Tim's blog. I never read the books (I'm allergic to fantasy-novelist prose at this point), so I'm not going to pull the "well in the BOOKS it's much CLEARER that..." business, but it seems really obvious to me that the viewer is meant to find these petty, scheming feudal barons and their vicious, bloodthirsty way of life contemptible. The king is a drunk, a thug, an oaf, and a boor, who by the end of the second episode is happily complicit in the murder of an innocent peasant child - and he's one of the better ones. There's genuine class consciousness here, and recognition of the malevolent hatred of and violence towards women in such a system.

The racist "noble savage" stuff with the Dothraki is bullshit, yeah. But even then it's nothing compared to Tolkien, who, let's not forget, didn't publish his crazily racist, warmongering epic in the late nineteenth century, but in the 1950s.

[Jacob]

I'm a Justified fan and all, but I completely get what you're saying here. You remember that scene -an episode ago?- where Boyd threatens Raylan after Raylan said something to Ava? I was expecting Raylan to come up with some witty comeback oozing with bravado. That's what Season 1 Raylan would have done, right?

But he just scowls and goes into his car...and drives off.

Really?

[Dan Coyle]

Wow, David Chase, you work in television WHY, exactly? Besides the money. Because shit, if that's how you feel, I'll leave you alone, fuck you very much.

[Shoulder Buddy]

Of all the shitty parts of the schlock that goes under the name of "fantasy", can anyone deny that the worst aspect is the hideous misogyny? The same friends try to force all of this on me, all the time, and I can't get through the first chapter of any of it without discovering that on THIS world, see, men have lightning bolt powers, but women have the ability to heal, and see your feelings.

[Shoulder Buddy]

Oh, and Mr. Stone, you seen Billy Tan on Uncanny X-Force yet? HOPE YOU LIKE BABY ARM

[moose n squirrel]

I'm waiting for that review of "Wolverine kills a hundred-and-ten-year-old Nazi, just cuz", myself.