Game of thrones

And so House of the Dragon has come to the end of its second season. It is fair to say that, for all the intrigue and fruity British character actors on screen (first place as far as I’m concerned: the great Simon Russell Beale as Ser Simon Strong, “the only gentleman in an ungentlemanly world”), the series is still finding its feet and has yet to provide the visceral thrills that might be expected of it. As my esteemed colleague Matt McDonald described it, “the second season was basically all foreplay. The first season ended with ‘wow, they’re about to fight some dragons.’ Then this season ends after one dragon fight and the promise ‘oh wow, now they’re really going to fight some dragons.’” There are undoubted improvements in this more confident second outing.

Some shows, like Game of Thrones, are only great so long as they stick to their source material. Others succeed by respecting the lore and cannon of a beloved novel or comic, but tell an original story in that universe. HBO’s Watchmen is the pinnacle example of this; however, the first season of The Boys may be the only show that succeeded precisely by not being like its source material. The Boys comics shares Watchmen’s premise of exploring an alternative reality where superheroes are real; but whereas Alan Moore considered this premise richly, and opposed the concept of superheroes on philosophical grounds — against the worship of power and great man theory of history —  that isn’t so for Garth Ennis.

Since the vast success of Game of Thrones, every streaming service has tried its best to come up with an epic series that will be held in the same estimation as the earlier seasons of Thrones. (The HBO flagship drama's rise was rivaled only by the rightful contempt in which the final series is still held, which one day will be the subject of a genuinely jaw-dropping long read or book.) There have been some close calls (House of the Dragon, Outlander), some misses (Lord of the Rings) and a couple of outright horrors; I doubt that you could pay me, or anyone else, to sit through the diabolical Wheel of Time again. But now Hulu has finally joined the action, with an apparently unlimited budget, to adapt James Clavell’s much-beloved bestselling 1975 novel Shōgun over ten episodes.

Netflix’s royal saga The Crown has been one of its biggest hits of the past few years. Sacrificing subtlety for big, dramatic arcs, with award-winning performances by a cast that has, in a stroke of genius on the part of its creator Peter Morgan, changed every two seasons, it’s been the most gripping and rich account of the post-war British royal family ever put on screen. It has been helped both by an enormous budget and the useful way in which the present-day battles between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the rest of the Firm have come to mirror The Crown’s increasingly eventful power struggles among the various branches of the family.

I have a confession, or perhaps a boast. I have never played the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, and now, at the grand old age of forty-one, I doubt I ever shall. But there’s no doubt it’s a cultural phenomenon that has long since transcended any suggestion of being the preserve of adolescents, literal and overgrown alike. Since it was created in 1974, sales of the game have grossed billions, and it has been played by tens if not hundreds of millions of people worldwide. To be an aficionado is to find yourself in broad company — but how does that translate at the movies?  The first answer to this question came in 2000, when a film that starred Jeremy Irons as the villainous Mage Profion was released in cinemas.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but I actually didn’t hate the ending of Game of Thrones. Sure, the showrunners fumbled some of the character arcs and made some odd decisions (King Bran? Really?). But the broad thematic arc of the series was perfect. Daenerys’s dark turn into madness and mass murder and the subsequent destruction of the Iron Throne served as a hopeful proclamation that, even in our bloody, jaded, pornified world, the true faith lives on. The show understood, on some level, that neither the ideal redistribution of power nor its unfettered aggrandizement could ever be our salvation. Martin made his name as the anti-Tolkien, but it was all a ruse. If his intentions were truly insidious, his story would “look fairer and feel fouler.

This week's finale of AMC's Better Call Saul represented a quiet end to the Golden Age of Television. It's a fitting end for Prestige TV — marked by lavish sets, sex, violence and episodes as expensive as feature films — to end with a small black-and-white ode to a spin-off. Bob Odenkirk's performance as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman, a pivotal bit character in Breaking Bad a decade ago, was marked by over-the-top colorful courtroom flair, but it ends with somber black-and-white drama and a quiet prison cell, serving almost as a muted on-screen act of penance for all that came before.

It was shortly after noon on a Sunday in Edinburgh, and I was attempting to remedy my jet lag at the local BrewDog outpost with a pint of sour ale and a large helping of pizza. I’d flown in on the red-eye from New York to attend a conference, hadn’t had much sleep, and initially thought I was hallucinating when I saw that one of the few other patrons in the bar was a notably tipsy woman wearing wizard robes, waving a wand around as she talked to her drinking companions. They were, I noted, red and gold robes: Gryffindor. (Professor Minerva McGonagall, Gryffindor House’s notoriously strict faculty overseer, would be unlikely to approve of such drunken behavior in public.

YASSSSS! SLAY KWEEEN! [insert several hand clap emojis here] After a two-week break at a Tantric Orgasmic Virtue Eco Retreat in the Yukon, I finally got around to watching Season 8 of Game of Thrones. I had heard that people were disappointed at how it ended to the point of creating a petition to change the results very much like Brexit, and I have to say, I was not in the least bit disappointed at not being disappointed. One thing that confused me however, was the way that many influential social justice bloggers were angry at how the character of Daenerys was portrayed. They accused the show of falling into the sexist trope of a woman being mad and hysterical, claiming that the writers had ‘failed women’. In my opinion that could not have been further from the truth.

The fans had been waiting months to hear the end of the story. It was the only story in town, the only story in every city, in every corner of the nation – the most important story in the world. They were desperate, needy and impatient to know how it ended: they were fans. Rumors said that a boat from England would bring the final installment of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop to America. Crowds of fans gathered at the docks in New York, or perhaps in Boston. It was true. There was a boat. A great hush spread among the crowd. At once the solitary figure of the packet’s captain appeared on deck. As the boat grew ever closer to the shore a dreadful noise began to stir amongst the fans. The captain, overcome with emotion, had tears streaming down his face.

Romain Rolland once complained that ‘there is too much music in Germany.’ Today there are too many television critics in the world. Some of the finest writers of multiple generations spend most of their writing lives recapping last night’s television. Is any of it really criticism, or are thousands of words agonizing over, say, Don Draper, adding up to anything more than the digital equivalent of chip wrapping? Such thoughts do not bother the critics. They are convinced of their rectitude, secure in their sense of being the most powerful tastemakers in the land. As the New Yorker’s queen of TV Emily Nussbaum put it in 2015: ‘Those of us who love TV have won the war. The best scripted shows are regarded as significant art - debated, revered, denounced.

In the 2020 primary, you win or you die. That’s the subtext of a new essay in The Cut by Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, entitled ‘The World Needs Fewer Cersei Lannisters.’ Liz has had a few headline-grabbing moments over the last few days. She issued a renewed call for Trump’s impeachment following the release of the redacted Mueller report. Now she’s piggy-backing off the hype around the biggest show in the world, writing episode reviews for New York magazine’s women’s site. Cockburn supposes they have to plug the holes left by those layoffs somehow. – Game of Thrones spoilers below – So who is Sen. Warren’s favorite character on the show?