GoT Spinoff Review, and the Decentralization of Culture
Or: How Gen-Z will never experience appointment TV
So I was at the local Trader Joe’s checking out, making small talk with the cashier, who was probably an 18 year old boy, tops. He asked me what I was doing tonight and I said I was going to check out this new Game of Thrones season.
“Oh cool, what season are you on?” He asked, inquisitively.
“No, it’s like a prequel season, it just started tonight” I tried to explain..
He nodded, unknowingly, telling me he never saw GoT, and was just getting into Breaking Bad (he was on season 3). It occurred to me then and there that this guy was probably 7 years old when GoT first aired, and that there had been no cult-television shows in the 11 years since then.
I’ve talked previously about how content has been watered down due to the decrease in its cost of creation. The game is not to make great art, but to keep people’s eye on screen as long as possible. This incentivizes cheaper production, an explosion in volume of content, so that every possible niche audience is accounted for. I’ve also talked about how this empowers creators to eventually usurp Hollywood as the defacto entertainment hub. But I think this also has an important implication in society:
The decentralization of content fractures culture as community, and enables multiple narratives, which has both good and bad consequences.
But first, my thoughts on the new GoT:
From the opening scene I had the most incredible sense of deja vu, which lasted pretty much the entire episode. Obviously this was sort of the point, to bring us back to where all the magic happened, tickle our memories with the same smoky cinematography and sharp production, triggering nostalgia like when the faint smell of wood reminds you of your grandmother’s kitchen table. But this wasn’t like the warm and cuddly familiarity of an old memory, this was more like when Neo had deja vu in The Matrix.
“A black cat just went past us, and then another one just like it..” - Neo
“How much like it? Was it the same cat?” - Trinity
“It might’ve been, I’m not sure..” - Neo
I literally thought I had already seen this exact show before. A dopey king, a powerfully smart and ambitious teen daughter, an ambiguously evil but possibly heroic strong uncle, old dudes politicking at the round table, backstabbings, dragons, brothels, and gore. It was like all the pieces were rearranged on the chess board and a new game was starting. It was like when all the actors from The Wire got roles in The Deuce, and the drug dealers were now detectives.
The acting was good minus the dopey king, but the writing was probably copied and pasted from various seasons or possibly written entirely by GPT-3 with the prompt “Game of Thrones, but again”. The gore was gorey, and they even threw in a patented shock value scene which depicted a c-section. To be honest I wasn’t that shocked. Note to the producers: everyone watching this show has witnessed the infamous “Red Wedding” scene from the original GoT, so it I don’t know how shocking it is to see a standard medical procedure that is performed 3x a week on Grey’s Anatomy.
Spinoffs are hard to do. Even harder when it is such a beloved franchise that ultimately went up in flames in a horrendous final season. Fans were upset, if you were going to quell them, you were always going to need to muster the firepower of a thousand Sopranos, which is to say, probably not even achievable. Dexter attempted this no less than a year ago with disastrous effect. In the end, HBO succumbed to the same sad story as Disney and Netflix, and pumped out a stock piece of licensed rubbish for which there will be a Gaussian distribution of core fans that are able to withstand a full season begrudgingly, while many others fall off once they are sufficiently sure the flame has not been rekindled. That’s probably harsh. HBO has very good production, and I am sure there will be twists and turns and tie-ins along the way, and the characters will grow on you, dragons will do badass dragon shit, yadda yadda yadda. For people who never watched the original, this might be half-decent enough to lure them in and have them binging the old stuff soon enough. Will I watch another episode? Eeek. I don’t think so, but to be clear I watch very, very little television. And as you can tell from the references I dropped, I only watch the classics.
So back to this whole decentralization of culture thing:
There is another interesting phenomenon happening in the world today that I am sure everyone is all too familiar with: cancel culture. That is, the culture of taking pride and joy in cancelling someone or something for doing something hateful or otherwise politically incorrect.
Cancel culture was born out of the MeToo movement and quickly spread to any arena where a consortium of people could agree that person X who said Y (which we don’t agree with) needs to be de-platformed and thus “cancelled”. There was a brief moment in time (all of Covid I suppose) where this was a serious thing, but I think it has subsided into something of a joke now.
The reason it has become a joke ties ties into the decentralization of culture. I was listening to The Lex Fridman Podcast and he had on as a guest Jordan Peterson, the controversial psychologist. The interview was fascinating but afterwards when I Googled Jordan Peterson, I was shocked to find out he was cancelled! Some other notable cancellations that were apparently news but I just learned about: JK Rowling, Matt Damon, Justin Timberlake, and Ellen!
My point about decentralization here is that, if someone is cancelled, and only the people within the cancel culture know about it, is that person actually cancelled? It’s like when a tree falls in the forest and no one is around. Actually it’s more like the Ship of Theseus. How many people must agree that a person is canceled in order for them to truly be cancelled? 51%? What about the 49% who still watch Harry Potter and listen to Future Sex Love Sounds? Does it need to be 100%? If 100% of people agree on a cancellation within their bubble, then of course they are cancelled within that bubble. The question becomes then, how often do you venture outside of your bubble? One one hand it’s good that there are so many diverse niches, but on the other hand, the power of diversity is only harnessed when you step outside of the homogenous bubble. You could have the most beautifully diverse mosaic of bubbles, but if each of the individual inhabitants only look inward, diversity doesn’t actually exist in their reality.
I do think this fragmentation or decentralization of culture is a good thing in the aggregate despite the glaring distractions that have brought it to this point. TV evolved from a few channels into an infinite diaspora of utter garbage. Social media and phone apps detracted our attention further. And while a few short years ago we thought we were dissenting into a bipolar worldview (at least in America) what ended up happening is that we dissented further and further as the algorithms disambiguate who we are into millions of bubbles.
So here we are. Some people like channel 22, some people like channel 691. Most people don’t even have channels anymore. Everyone is so into their own niche that it is rare for pop culture to cut through in broad swaths anymore. Sure we all get served up the same videos because we are geolocated, but even “going viral” now doesn’t mean as much as it used to. In the early days of Social (literally 10 years ago), some dude would build a Rube Goldberg machine and be featured in the Sportscenter Top 10. Now, 15 million followers gets you a bunch of brand deals, but still no one has ever heard of you outside of your niche. Then world is bigger, the bubbles can be both bigger, and more granular. And that’s the thing, there is plenty of attention and money to go around that it makes sense for the diaspora to exist. With the cost to produce a unit of content so low, the strategy of infinite niches vs one large mega bomb of culture makes more sense.
However, I can’t help but feel nostalgia for the appointment-TV that was such a prominent feature throughout my Millennial childhood. From sneaking downstairs to watch Seinfeld on Thursday nights, to the long reign of HBO Sunday night shows, it’s getting harder and harder to capture people in a particular time and space, let alone culture.