Will the Televisual Trauma Caused By This Show Ever Heal?

By Petr Navovy | TV | November 16, 2023 |

By Petr Navovy | TV | November 16, 2023 |

It genuinely seems like a fever dream now, the absolute chokehold that Game Of Thrones once had on our lives. It was just completely bonkers! When it was on, and it was in its prime, my whole week was structured around it. I can’t imagine any show having this effect on me now. Granted, my TV watching has tumbled off a cliff in the last few years, but there are still a few shows—we’re talking dramas here, as that kind of edge-of-your-seat addiction doesn’t really happen with comedies—that I enjoy a lot, but nothing that approaches the levels of mania and sheer investment that Game Of Thrones whipped up.

The size of the collective experience definitely helped with that, but the quality at the heart of the show was undeniable. We wouldn’t have all lost our minds over it if it hadn’t been. It’s what makes the precipitous plummet at the end so much more dramatic. I really can’t think of a drop in quality comparable to the one that Game Of Thrones underwent. Imagining it as a graph always reminds me of the writing that Arthur and his knights find on the wall of the cave in Monty Python and the Holy Grail just before they get attacked by the Black Beast of Argh.

I missed it at the time, but the guys over at ‘Pitch Meeting’ released a video a few years back in which they catalogued at least a fraction of the nonsense that the final season of Game Of Thrones—aka the perfect storm of inconsistent, nonsensical plotting, un-earned moments and huge leaps, incoherent characterisation and writing, and just…stuff seemingly happening for no real reason whatsoever other than to finish things off so that the showrunners could move on to something else—was composed of. It popped up on YouTube just now for me, as they’ve revisited it, so what better opportunity than to watch the original that’s embedded in it? This is how we all process and heal and move on, right?

Right?