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--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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, visit kiwico.com slash explained.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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. 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 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, they could use footage from the original one where they're clean shaven to like explain why their beard disappears. It's really weird.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: Wow, that makes sense now. Go on, Tommy, cheer him good. He's never met a girl he likes better than his own hair.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): When it started, like, 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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, she 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 you probably already know this. But they have the soft hearts of women. So long as I am your king, treason shall never go unpunished. Sir Illyn, bring me his head.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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 some fantasy experiment on HBO to sort of a cultural thing?
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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 the wedding needs a bedding.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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 States, but in the world. This is a show that draws massive viewership around the globe. It's kind of the first actual international blockbuster TV show.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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 quite mean what massive success meant even 10 years ago
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: On the other hand, like, the total audience for this show is probably gonna 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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 bleeping saw one.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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 got good news. Ask them what is going to come back in style.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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. 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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, Jack? the island.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: Lord of the Rings was huge. It won a bunch of Oscars. Like Harry Potter was huge. Those books defined a generation. Those movies were all massive successes. Like 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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 young and old love. It's the thing that an American, but also someone in Uzbekistan both love.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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. Especially when it became really diffuse, when the characters scattered to the winds. You could watch the Arya show, and that's like a coming-of-age story about a young woman learning to seize her power.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: Or you could watch the Jon Snow show, and that's 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. Everyone dies!
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Is there a part of this though that's just like people getting upset that their fantasy isn going according to their own fantasy I mean I sure there are people who are upset that the character they wanted to win the whole Game of Thrones didn win the Game of Thrones
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: Like, the story's about the breaking of those cycles, and it feels like the show, in its dedication to making every plot twist as awesome as possible, has sort of lost sight of that.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): In a minute, will there ever again be another show that gets people to gather around the campfire like this one did? The break is coming. Thank you.
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--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): That come with different projects. He says the projects are fun and easy enough to do on their own and interesting and complex enough that your kids feel a real sense of accomplishment once they're done, even if they're a little older. He said, Our favorites have been the trebuchet, which I learned is French for catapult, sorry if my pronunciation was off, but also the Japanese calligraphy kits. It all sounds like a pretty good way to spend some time.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: Kiwiko right now is offering today to explain listeners the chance to try them out gratis. That's French for free, and I know my pronunciation was bad. To redeem the offer and learn more about the projects for kids of all ages, visit kiwico.com slash explain.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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?
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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. They're very different properties in terms of structure.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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 always hesitant to be like you know this is something sort of baked into the show I think it impossible to predict how your audience will react to this show
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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 this show was winter is coming. A very long, punishing winter that could threaten all the living.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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?
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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 Valar Dohyris. who serves as they are.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Danny Podcast, Danny Podcast, Danny Podcast. And break master silenteer. We're part of the Fox Video Podcast Network and Stitcher helps the show get made. No other news show is this insane. It is today.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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 it's just a little boy. It's Bran. And 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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'd love to watch a show that's just those kinds of interactions. Yeah, like that should be one of the spinoffs.
--:-- Todd Vanderwerf: 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.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): 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.
