tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6345577.post4272543395309524311..comments2024-03-28T09:53:43.900-04:00Comments on The Hurting: Tegan O'Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14815842488966694944noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6345577.post-26629242198663211542013-06-10T10:51:50.608-04:002013-06-10T10:51:50.608-04:00Departing from your actual post to pick up on your...Departing from your actual post to pick up on your astute twitter observation re: GoT: This series has always had a, shall we say, problematic depiction of race, all throughout the Daenarys storyline - it started out rough when it was all about noble savages, and hasn't gotten much better now that's it's progressed to a vision of slave liberation that's all about white people freeing benighted, passive natives from above. Part of this seems to stem from racist baggage inherited from the genre which Martin never bothered to examine or subvert the way he's tried to subvert so many other genre tropes, and part of it just seems to stem from the bullshit Americans are told about our own history, in which white dudes just magnanimously freed helpless black slaves for the hell of it, and Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and the history of slave rebellions leading up to and throughout the civil war never happened.<br /><br />(And speaking of Mad Men, I have serious problems with the way Matt Weiner has handled race on that show, as well - although that's part and parcel of the trap Mad Men has fallen into, namely, of trying to tell the story of the social movements of the 60s from the perspective of wealthy white executive class - a class which was totally incidental to that history, when not completely antagonistic to it. It's quite possibly the least interesting perspective to take on the period, and one of the reasons why Don Draper and company have become so boring this season - everything interesting is happening offstage, on their televisions, while they smoke, furrow their brows, and think about new ways to sell ketchup.)moose n squirrelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6345577.post-43458782133354523792013-06-07T15:01:52.504-04:002013-06-07T15:01:52.504-04:00Eh, that line reads to me like the producer of a T...Eh, that line reads to me like the producer of a TV show talking fairly sensibly about the titanic task of producing seven seasons of a TV show the size and scope of this one: it's big, it's expensive, it's got to be hell to put together on a good day, and no one on any series can take for granted that the audience for a series will still be around for them four-to-six years from now (which is basically what he's talking about there).moose n squirrelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6345577.post-56377002188879892762013-06-07T14:55:36.660-04:002013-06-07T14:55:36.660-04:00I'm not that concerned about Game of Thrones&#...I'm not that concerned about Game of Thrones's future - and I definitely don't think comparisons to Deadwood or Carnivale are warranted. Those shows were always cult phenomena - appreciated by critics and a small but devoted fanbase. Game of Thrones, on the other hand, is a gigantic hit - a bigger commercial hit than The Sopranos was, certainly. And while the show is expensive to make, it's been steadily pulling in viewers - when it premiered, it had 2.2 million viewers; this season it's frequently hit above 5 million. The show could shed half a million viewers and still be the cable television equivalent of printing money.<br /><br />And honestly, I don't think it's going to lose that many viewers regardless. The show already demonstrated it could pull off the "let's kill the heroes" trick and get away with it when they killed Ned Stark - and I'm going to go against conventional wisdom and say that Ned's death was a LOT more of a shock, and more of a blow to readers'/viewers' innocence, or what have you, then the Red Wedding was, simply because it happened first, at a time in the narrative when no one was expecting this sort of thing, while the notion that Robb was going to die, and that very specifically something horrible was going to happen at the Freys' place, had been telegraphed for weeks.<br /><br />Beyond that - the following of a TV show, and more broadly a piece of serialized entertainment, at a certain point becomes larger than the following for individual characters or elements of that entertainment. How pissed off were readers when Gwen Stacy was killed off? Pretty pissed, I bet. I'll bet there were some who even quit reading Spider-man as a result. But a lot more had developed an attachment to Spider-man - the comic, not just the character - more than they had to Gwen Stacy, and wanted to see what happened next. That's how it was with the audience of Martin's books, and that's how it'll be with the audience of the TV show (audiences which aren't nearly as different as anyone involved would like to think). The challenge of the show will not be whether it can survive killing off some of (but not nearly all) of its more likable characters, but whether it can navigate and adapt the next few books in the series in a way that's satisfying and entertaining, given that, by all accounts, things get bloated and clunky from here on out.moose n squirrelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6345577.post-79427932513649104552013-06-05T12:22:09.130-04:002013-06-05T12:22:09.130-04:00I don’t follow the books or the show but I like wa...I don’t follow the books or the show but I like watching people’s reactions to it. I don’t know if you saw but a few weeks ago one of the producers said he thought the show would run seven seasons. After this episode his quote reads very differently: “I would hope that, if we all survive and if the audience stays with us, we'll probably get through to seven seasons”<br />http://www.avclub.com/articles/game-of-thrones-is-already-thinking-about-its-end,97922/adam farrarnoreply@blogger.com