It turned out that nobody knew what they were looking for until it arrived. When it premiered, Game of Thrones was utterly unlike anything on television. In many ways, Game of Thrones was a test case for HBO’s promise, “It’s not TV. By the final season, each episode cost about $15M. By the show’s sixth season, the budget had climbed to $10M per episode. The second season alone filmed over 106 days, using two units working simultaneously.
ALL GAME OF THRONES NUDE SCENES SERIES
The series pushed the boundaries of television production, spread across multiple countries and even continents. It’s too expensive.” More than that, there was a popular perception that fantasy didn’t work on television, to the point that early seasons of Game of Thrones were sold as “fantasy for people who don’t like fantasy.” Martin thought that his fantasy epic was “unfilmable” and warned producers, “It’s too big.
Early press for the show emphasized that even author George R.R. Game of Thrones was an incredible creative risk for everybody involved. It was a unicorn, as mythic as the dragons it came to feature. There had never been another television show that looked like it before there had never been another television show that had been made like it before. After all, Game of Thrones was a sui generis piece of television. It probably won’t even look like Game of Thrones. It is highly unlikely that it will look like The Wheel of Time or Lord of the Rings. This gets to the heart of the debate over what “the next Game of Thrones” will look like. It’s a very reactive approach to making television, chasing trends rather than making them. It’s the logic one might expect from a company like Amazon, hoping to lure customers with the promise of an off-brand equivalent of something that they already know that they enjoy. In September 2017, Jeff Bezos reportedly instructed his executives, paraphrasing, “Bring me Game of Thrones.” While Game of Thrones has an obsessive following among tech-company billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, who would famously pause business negotiations for Game of Thrones watch parties, Bezos’ motivations were more pragmatic.īrad Stone, the author of Amazon Unbound, has argued that Bezos doesn’t have “any particular love for Game of Thrones” but is instead trying to capitalize on larger trends. Why wouldn’t studios want to replicate that success? Amazon Prime has been the service most aggressively trying to synthesize its own Game of Thrones. Even allowing for the vocal online reaction to the show’s final season, it seems that Game of Thrones is enjoying a rich and lucrative creative afterlife. Of course, it makes sense that audiences, studios, and tastemakers should be on the lookout for “the next Game of Thrones.” The series was a genuine cultural phenomenon, to the point that its conclusion generated think pieces on whether audiences would watch television the same way ever again. There’s something grimly funny in the knowledge that Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings series will attract the same sort of headlines. There will inevitably be the next “next Game of Thrones.” HBO is committed to creating spin-offs from Game of Thrones, rightful heirs to the title. Past contenders for the Thrones throne include His Dark Materials, Shadow & Bone, and The Witcher. To be fair, The Wheel of Time isn’t the first series to be branded “the next Game of Thrones,” just the latest. The Telegraph insisted that “ The Wheel of Time isn’t the next Game of Thrones – it’s the original.” The Nerdist begged, “Stop saying The Wheel of Time is the next Game of Thrones.” Press around The Wheel of Time framed the fantasy epic as “the next Game of Thrones.” A headline in GQ described it as “Amazon’s huge gamble on the next Game of Thrones.” SyFy posted its review round-up asking, “Is Wheel of Time the next Game of Thrones?” The cliché is so ubiquitous that it has generated a backlash. The Wheel of Time premieres today on Amazon Prime, so it seemed like as good a time as any to explore one of the big trends in contemporary television.