Today, Explained - All shows must die

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

What do we say to the God of Death? Not today. Explained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Friday, the weekend's here, maybe your kid's looking for something to do. Try a KiwiCo project. Right now, KiwiCo is offering today Explained listeners the chance to try their projects out for free. To redeem the offer and learn more about KiwiCo projects for kids of all ages, it turns out, visit KiwiCo.com slash Explained. Thank you. I remember this one Sunday evening in 2012 when I walked into a room in my parents' house in Southern California. My brother and his girlfriend were watching this fantasy show. There were dragons, there was incest, there was Peter Dinklage, and I was judgy. I was like, what are y'all doing with your time?

They told me, you know, it's actually pretty good. I did not believe them. Nim, Alex, I'm sorry, it is actually pretty good. But in my defense, it didn't start out that way. Todd of House Vanderwerf, first of his name, ruler of Vox's brand new primetime podcast, has the tea. So this show debuted in 2011, and when it aired, it's actually the second pilot you're seeing. Huh. The original pilot, which I know one person who's seen, and he was like, it was pretty bad. There was a different actress playing Cat like, it was pretty bad. There was a different actress playing Cat Stark. There was a different actress playing Daenerys.

And it was directed by Tom McCarthy, the guy who did Spotlight. And if you could think of a great match for Game of Thrones, it's Tom McCarthy, the guy who did Spotlight. And HBO almost didn't pick it up. They had to reshoot 90% of it is my understanding. And that's probably slightly overestimated. But like one of the things that sort of gives you a sense that they shot two pilots is in the pilot we have now, all the men get a shave so that they can use footage from the original one where they're clean shaven to like explain why their beard disappears. It's really weird. Wow. That makes sense now. Go on, Tommy. Sheer him good. He's

never met a girl he likes better than his own hair. When it started, it kind of was not this big auspicious thing. HBO had really kind of put its chips on Boardwalk Empire, which had debuted in the fall of 2010, had done very well, was directed by Martin Scorsese, had some of the people from The Sopranos behind it, had Steve Buscemi and a bunch of other big names in its cast. Game of Thrones, meanwhile, has Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage, who are, you know, famous guys, but like not as huge as some of the names that were attached to Boardwalk Empire. It was in fantasy, a genre that traditionally hasn't done that great on TV, has always been pretty cheesy. And it was in this space where people were like, I mean, I'm sure it'll be interesting,

but I'm not sure it's HBO's next big thing. And we were all so wrong. Did the creators know? Did the Weisses and the Benioffs know that they had something that had potential? Well, I mean, they loved the books. They'd read the books. So they knew that there was potential there if they could get to some of the more dramatic events.

A fair amount of people are watching. It was not a slouch when it debuted, but when it goes from that to a show that starts to get that, you've just got to see this buzz is when that first big major event happens toward the end of season one. My mother wishes me to let Lord Eddard join the Night's Watch. Stripped of all titles and powers, he would serve the realm in permanent exile. And my lady Sansa has begged mercy for her father. And I guess I'm going to spoil this if you haven't seen Game of Thrones, but, like, you probably already know this. That is when the story really kicks off.

And that is when people get excited about the show. So killing the show's patriarch, its main character at the end of season one is how Game of Thrones goes from like some fantasy experiment on HBO to sort of a cultural thing. Yeah, it really is the point at which the show becomes this massive point of discussion. It's not yet as big as it will be. I think that that happens kind of around the end of season three when there's another major plot twist.

A sword needs a sheath. And a wedding needs a bedding. I'm still loathe to spoil because I think it's interesting and great. And that is when the show just, like, really takes off into the stratosphere and becomes one of the top shows of its era and then the only show in some ways.

But, like, that killing of Ned Stark was so different from what other TV shows had done that it really garnered the attention of TV watchers, of awards voters, of the kinds of people who could put that show on the radar. And that is sort of what sent the show skyrocketing. After these two huge moments that become game changers, what happens to this show? How big does it get? We don't have great viewership numbers for things like Netflix and Hulu, but from all indications, Game of Thrones is the biggest show, not just in the United massive viewership around the globe. It's kind of the first actual international blockbuster TV show. There are others that certainly had viewership in certain parts of the world. This is the first one that's kind of hit every part of the world. And it's been interesting to watch that happen.

But we have to be very sort of careful to temper that because massive success doesn't quite mean what massive success meant even 10 years ago. Like this show is big in the United States. It draws around 13 million viewers per episode who sit down and watch it live. And then that expands to somewhere north of 20 million when you factor in all the people who are catching up with it. But there were 30 million some people watching American Idol 10 years ago, and they were all watching it live. On the other hand, like the total audience for this show is probably going to be higher than American Idol in the end, because who wants to go and rewatch American Idol? And like Game of Thrones is a show that if you've never seen it, you can always catch

up with it and it will always be satisfying. So like this is a show that I think is going to become a milestone in the way that television is consumed because it was international and because it was built so readily for you to jump in five years from now and have satisfying is not the adjective I'd use, but definitely have an experience. Because it can be a bit of a bummer sometimes. How does a show about fantasy,

how does a fantasy show that features dragons and incest and sword fighting? I mean, you don't wonder why people love American Idol or why people watch the Super Bowl, but this still feels surprising. It's so easy to mock. It's so easy to question. You know, I hear that a lot and it always kind of throws me because if you look at the big monoculture shows before Game of Thrones, there aren't a lot of fantasy shows, but there are a lot of shows that are in genres adjacent to fantasy. The X-Files in the 1990s was huge and the X-Files was like about government agents chasing space aliens through the night. Like there were fantastical elements there. He didn't even seem human. I think he was a mandroid.

The only time he reacted was when he saw the dead body. Yeah, that's a bleeping dead alien body if I ever bleep and saw one. You look at Twin Peaks in its early days. It was huge. That is a show with like weird mystical dream logic and all of this sort of stuff. I've got good news. Ask the mule what he's going to. Come back in style. The most obvious precursor to Game of Thrones

would be the 2000 show Lost, which is kind of sci-fi, but also kind of fantasy. It takes place on this magical, mystical island where all manner of wild things happen. It's very similar to Game of Thrones in how it deploys its cast, how it sort of splits them up among multiple locations. Like, when you look back at those early reviews of Game of Thrones, they're comparing it to other HBO programming, yeah, but when they really are comparing it to stuff, they're comparing it to Lost.

Each one of us was brought here for a reason. Brought here. And who brought us here, John? The island. Lost is kind of a template for this. So I do hear a lot that it's like surprising that a fantasy show broke through, but to me, that's never been that weird, especially in the context of the 2000s so far have had a lot of successful fantasy stuff.

Lord of the Rings was huge. It won a bunch of Oscars. Harry Potter was huge. Those books defined a generation. Those movies were all massive successes. Game of Thrones is just the logical outgrowth of a bunch of pop culture moments that were happening. That it got as big as it did is a testament to how skillfully it was done, but also to how kind of the rest of the pop culture has splintered. So we're not watching everything as obsessively as we used to. It feels to me like Game of Thrones really unites all sorts of people. I guess this might be speaking towards your point about the monoculture,

but it's like the thing Democrats and Republicans love. It's the thing that like young and old love. It's the thing that an American, but also someone in Uzbekistan both love. It's the thing that like young and old love. It's the thing that an American, but also someone in Uzbekistan both love. Yeah. I think that one of the things that's kind of smart about it is it has a whole bunch of different shows sort of nestled within it, if that makes sense. Like, especially when it became really diffuse, when the characters scattered to the winds, like you could watch the A show, and that's like a coming-of-age story about a young woman, like, learning to seize her power.

What do we say to the god of death? Not today. Or you could watch the Tyrion show, and that's kind of a show of compelling courtroom intrigue. I wish I had enough poison for the whole pack of you. I would gladly give my life to watch you all swallow it. Or you could watch the Jon Snow show, and that's like much more action-packed and much more visceral and straightforward. You have my word.

I've given orders. Don't think you're going to be there to enforce those orders. If they get through, everyone dies. Having all of these tones sort of nestled next to each other, again, that's very like Lost, which had, you know, flashbacks that took you into different genres in essence. Like, that is one of the things that I think drove the show to its height, and I think it's one of the reasons these last two seasons have disappointed some fans. We've gotten away from that as the characters have largely collapsed into the same storylines. And as these storylines have come

together, the show's gotten bigger, more ambitious. How expensive has it become? The stated budget we have is $15 million per episode, which is roughly $90 million for the full season. That's by far the biggest budget television has ever seen. And it's sort of created this arms race to up budgets in other areas, to adapt more expensive materials. Like, that's really been sort of a fascinating offshoot of this. But all that money in the eyes of fans and certainly some critics isn't necessarily buying better episodes. No, you know, and I think that one of the things

that has really dogged these final two seasons is they've done 10 episode seasons for the first six years. But looking at this final season especially, it's become so clear how much more room they would have had if they had just done 10 episode seasons for those final two seasons. There are a lot of character turns in this final season that would make more sense if we had even like one more episode to sort of live with those characters and be in their headspace. And because we didn't get that, I think it's falling flat for some people.

Is there a part of this though that's just like people getting upset that their fantasy isn't going according to their own fantasy? I mean, I'm sure there are people who are upset that the character they wanted to win the whole Game of Thrones didn't win the Game of Thrones. But most of the stuff that's happened that has made people the most upset is stuff that has been predicted,

foreshadowed, looked at from that lens for years and years now. The problem, again, has just been the show is over-relying on spectacle and on plot twists and on surprise and shock. And that has created a situation where these plot twists are happening and they don't feel like they have emotional grounding beyond like, well, I read the Wikipedia page and it said this. it's taken a show that sort of started out in the world of psychological realism where the characters had actual feelings that we sort of could relate to even if they lived in a vastly different world and political system from our own but then it's turned it back into a kind of myth

where they're ruled by their own like impulses and emotions and like there's no way for them to fight back against the tragic legacy that they were born into. That's not what the story seemed to be. Like, the story's about the breaking of those cycles, and it feels like the show, in gets people to gather around the campfire like this one did? The break is coming. A thing that's been happening since we've started running these KiwiCo ads is that people will come up to me and be like, hey, did you know that I use KiwiCo? And I'll always be like, no, that's great. So my neighbors were one example, but Amit over here at Vox Media from the data science department was like, hey, yeah, I use this for my older kids. They subscribe to both the Tinker Crate and the Doodle Crate. They're different crates that come with different projects. He says the projects are fun and easy enough to do on their own

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Todd, is Game of Thrones the last Targaryen, the final show that was promised to the monoculture? Is this the end of things we all watch together by the old gods and the new? No, I don't think so. This is one of the things that people forget. When Game of Thrones came on the air, two of its contemporaries were Mad Men and Breaking Bad, which were not as big as Game of Thrones. Breaking Bad came close, but there are always big TV shows people are talking about. And the other thing is they rarely look like the last big TV show.

If you're chasing this is going to be the next big fantasy show, it's going to be a while before we get the next big fantasy show because people are going to be burned out on fantasy after this. How, if at all, will this fantasy show influence those that follow? This and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have really created this tight drive toward big, serialized genre entertainment. There are very different properties in terms of structure. The MCU is kind of committed to having every movie be a separate quote-unquote episode, like has its own story. But I feel like the biggest change it's made to television, especially, has been the idea of prioritizing the big, shocking moment. This show and then

American Horror Story, which debuted around the same time, were both shows that sort of prided themselves on the episode almost doesn't matter. The biggest moment from the episode is what matters. And I think what happened to Game of Thrones that kind of made it ultimately less satisfying to me was they pushed that to hyperdrive. And every episode suddenly has four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten huge moments and none of them get any space to land. And like, I hope that television turns away from this storytelling trend because Game of Thrones does it well. Most of the shows that have copied it have really struggled to make it happen because they don't have the character grounding that Game of Thrones does. I remember reading that Barack Obama was requesting early screeners of Game of Thrones episodes from HBO and actually getting them. And of course, our current sitting president tweets out weird memes of himself in like Game of Thrones font. Did this show have like real world implications outside of TV, outside of fantasy? Ooh, that's a tricky answer. And that's sort of one of the things we deal with in my new podcast,

Primetime, from the Vox Media Podcast Network, Vox.com. What I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about this based on something we talk about on Primetime, which is we talked about the show, The West wing and the show, the West wing is in a hermetically sealed vacuum. It was made between 1999 and 2006. And there's nothing that can change that show. Like that show is set in stone. How we react to that show though, changes. Like there are people now who think it wasn't leftist enough. There are people who think it didn't deal with questions of race and gender well enough. There are people who think all of these sorts of things about like what the West Wing taught us about the world. But what we're really talking about is what we took from the West Wing.

What are the lessons we learned from it? And those shift and change with time. And like that's the case with every TV show. So every TV show kind of bleeds over into the real world. And like it does have wider implications for how we live our lives. It has wider implications for our political culture beyond just our pop culture. But at the same time, I'm always hesitant to be like, you know, this is something sort of baked into the show. I think it's impossible to predict how your audience will react to this show. Like, yes,

Donald Trump sometimes tweets memes, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't know what the show is about or like what happens on it because the memes he tweets are all like self-defeating. Like he tweeted, the wall is coming. A big point of Game of Thrones is that the wall is eventually going to fall. Presidents are always trying to draft off of the big pop culture phenomenon and the big pop culture phenomenon is largely, I don't want to say impervious to them, but like it does sort of have to ignore them to do what it needs to do. So we don't need to be worried about Donald Trump taking his, you know, political strategy from Cersei Lannister or Daenerys Targaryen.

Wouldn't it be wild if Donald Trump created an army of ice zombies and was like, this is what you get. Like, I mean, that would certainly be a political argument. If you don't give me what I want, I'm going to create ice zombies. In all seriousness, though, one of the many refrains of the show was winter is coming. A very long, punishing winter that could threaten all the living. There was a very obvious real-world application of that. Was this fantasy show useful in helping us deal with difficult realities? Yeah, this is an interesting thing about the 2010s. We don't have a lot of pop culture that's directly addressing our world.

It's addressing it from the side. It's addressing it diagonally. It's sort of doing what genre fiction has always done, which is talk about the present in terms of the distantly removed past, which is full of magic and dragons and stuff, or in terms of an imagined future. That's cool. I love that. But at the same time, I kind of miss when we had ways of talking about American power

that didn't involve talking about Iron Man. You know, when we had ways of talking about the political candidates through a fictional lens that wasn't like, well, which one of them is Daenerys Targaryen and which one of them is Jon Snow? Like, I miss when we had lenses other than the fantastical. On the other hand, I think we're living in an era when the problems feel so existential when you look at something like climate change and think, well, that could kill billions of people, that could drastically reshape the surface of the earth. And we have like 10 years to deal with it. It's really hard to talk about through the lens of realistic fiction. It's much

easier to talk about through the lens of here come the ice zombies. And like, that is sort of one of these things that Game of Thrones, the Marvel universe, they give us ways to talk about these problems through the lens of metaphor. And that's really useful because then you can look at it without actually looking at it. And that helps you think about it in a way that feels more concrete than we're all going to die. But Todd, all men must die. Yes. Valar Morghulis. Valar Dohaeris. Thomas Farad is the host. I already know.

Gucci is our head of show. We've got four producers and they are Halima, Bridget Noah, Mamina, and Siona. Then we've got to feed the engineer And break Master's still in tears. We're part of the Fox Media Podcast Network. And Stitcher helps the show get made. No other news show is this insane. It's Today Explained. Podcast, daily podcast, daily podcast, daily podcast, daily podcast. Do you have any theories as to who will sit on the throne in the final episode?

I have actually long thought it would be Bran, and here's the stupid reason for it. In the first book, the first point of view chapter is from the point of view of Bran. Here's the thing I love about George R. R. Martin. He's kind of the world's worst writer, but he's so good at it that you can't help but admire him. So I'm like, if I was kind of the world's worst writer, but also with a lot of skill and craft, so I'm able to push it over the finish line, I'd make the first point of view character be from the point of view of the person who ultimately ends up the king and like it's just a little boy it's bran and like so i don't even think he'd be an interesting king i just would like to see that happen because i predicted it based on a totally stupid theory of how people should write books i'd love to watch that show because every moment with bran from the

past two seasons has just been like this awkward, pregnant, unsatisfying interaction for all the other characters. I would love to watch a show that's just those kinds of interactions. Yeah, like that should be one of the spinoffs. And one of the things that George R.R. Martin has always said is that he doesn't believe being like just rulership is possible. So like, that could be a commentary on if you want to have a good king, if you want to have a just king, you basically need someone who can see all of time and space and is disconnected from human concerns. Thanks to KiwiCo for supporting the show today. You can find out more about KiwiCo's projects that not only empower kids to learn,

but hopefully to also make a difference at KiwiCo.com slash explained. That's K-I-W-I-C-O dot com slash explained. You can try them out for free there. Check it out.