How Game of Thrones generates an industry of content based on manufactured outrage

How Game of Thrones generates a spinoff industry of content based on manufactured shock Calum Marsh

The most consistently amazing t hing about Game of Thrones is its capacity to scandalize. If movies are machines that generate empathy, as Roger Ebert famously claimed, then HBO’s popular medieval fantasy series is a machine that generates offence: the outrage it seems to inspire on a weekly basis, ventilated in broadsheet editorials and thousand- word blog posts blazoned the morning after every new episode airs, remains inexhaustible, even as the show enters its seventh season.

That’s the one thing we can predict of this Sunday’s premiere with any certainty: whatever violent delights may transpire – whatever butchery or mutilation proves essential to the ongoing saga of the Seven Kingdoms – we can be sure of the indignant web-wide yawp to follow. Issues of representation are a matter of course in its reception: the series will continue to have a gender problem, or a race problem, or a problem with the kinds of things it does and doesn’t show. This is a program that is well-accustomed to criticism on political grounds – and the outrage won’t abate this time around. The show’s writers will be accused of indelicacy. HBO will be charged with exploitation. And Game of Thrones, once again, will be said to have gone Too Far.

Game of Thrones is always going too far – or is in any case always provoking critics to claim as much. What’s occasioned umbrage so far? Well, Theon Greyjoy burned a pair of innocent children to death and hung their tiny charred bodies on display. Tyrion Lannister murdered his father on the toilet and his exlover in bed. Cersei Lannister was obliged to walk through the streets of King’s Landing nude, humiliated and abused – not long before which she had been raped by her brother before the corpse of her murdered son. Sexual violence frequently abounds: several of the show’s central female characters have been victimized on screen cruelly, including Daenerys Stormborn and, more recently, Sansa Stark. Skulls have been crushed. Heads, among other body parts, have been severed. A pregnant Talisa Stark was stabbed in the belly. Poor little Shireen Baratheon was burned at the stake.

Needless to say, Game of Thrones is intended to upset its audience. That much should have been obvious from its pilot, which concludes with a cheerful 10-year-old boy accidentally observing an incestuous tryst and being shoved out of a sixstorey tower window. Thrones defies expectations as a matter of course, which is precisely its appeal: you watch because it barrels toward conventional dramatic satisfaction and then thwarts it at the last minute, punishing without mercy its most likeable and charismatic characters, and rewarding with victory and glamour those so malevolent that their very appearance fills you with rage. When the righteous, right-minded Ned Stark investigates the suspicious death of King Baratheon, you can all but guarantee that, far from solving the crime and foiling the schemes devised by the nefarious Lannisters, he will wind up summarily beheaded by them – a first-season twist so vexing that more sensitive viewers abandoned the series in irritation before season two. The show understands acutely what you want and unfailingly does the opposite.

In this, Game of Thrones is not unlike another critically acclaimed HBO drama: The Wire, David Simon’s five- season Baltimore crime epic often celebrated as the greatest series in TV history. The Wire invented, and then perfected, the art of the frustrated expectation, making use of the serialized format to insist, over and over again, harrowingly, that America’s most enduring institutions – its courts, its schools, its newspapers – were so mired in corruption and bureaucratic disorder that justice would always be thwarted by avarice and predation. In other words, The Wire was deliberately unsatisfying. It went out of its way to disappoint, because it wanted to reflect the truth of life: that principles alone will get you nothing.

But there is a marked difference between the indignation inspired every Monday morning by Game of Thrones and how The Wire was received week after week when it was first on the air. No minor meltdowns were publicly staged. No radical grievances about brutality and sadism were self- righteously aired. In fact, very little was written about The Wire at the time, at least by the standards of contemporary television – endless diatribes of the episode- recap variety being pretty well nonexistent circa 2002. It isn’t difficult to imagine the sort of ink that might be spilled if The Wire had arrived a decade later. What events could be scrutinized for their politics? What incidents could be deemed problematic? Col- umnists have attempted to drum up chagrin over these transgressions retroactively: the show’s been looked back on in certain quarters as variously racist, misogynistic, and otherwise flagrantly ill- conceived. Were new episodes still being made we’d be hearing complaints like this nonstop.

Are we simply better attuned to problems of representation in pop culture now than we were 15 years ago? Or are we better equipped, thanks to improved media literacy and a culture that values this kind of analysis, to think seriously about the political import of cable TV? Certainly audiences seem more aware today than ever of the ways mainstream movies and television have failed them. This idea of the problematic has so swiftly and forcefully entered the public consciousness that conversations which not so long ago would have been relegated to the halls of academia are had today at the dinner table in the common tongue. We are all fluent now in a shared language of analysis, and we can speak freely of the callousness boasted by Game of Thrones to an extent that’s never been so widely possible.

But the ire recurringly aroused by Game of Thrones is not always so organic. Rather, it tends to attract a brand of writing – incensed, chiding, spurious – whose odium feels distinctly preordained. So many of the arguments mounted against Game of Thrones each week seem somewhat synthetic, devised not out of genuine concern but out of a need to find something to say; you get the sense that the writer has scoured the episode in question actively looking for something to home in on and sanctimoniously denounce, as if in pursuit of a prize for the web’s most moral critic.

Acts of candid violence that have been the show’s metier from the beginning are seized upon as glamorized. Bad things depicted are written about as if they’d been endorsed. For every honest, fruitful assessment of, say, how the series represents sexual assault – a point of contention for many after a season-six episode involving Sansa Stark and Ramsay Snow – a dozen more dubious remonstrances are bogusly declared. It’s an epidemic of phony moralizing.

But this moralizing is only a symptom – and the disease is economic. The problem is not so much that TV writers are inordinately inclined to be offended by what they watch on TV. It’s that TV writers need to be inclined to feel something about what they watch, and something, indeed, worth writing about: they need content because, like everyone, they need to eat. Ersatz controversy is a handy way to pay the bills. Game of Thrones is not unique in this respect. Any series, popular or otherwise, can be mined for problematic content to lambast – witness recent efforts to denounce GLOW ( misogynistic), The Ranch ( reactionary, conservative), and even Fear the Walking Dead (vaguely racist), as if anybody actually cared about these programs at all – while the biggest names on the airwaves, from Amy Schumer to Kimmy Schmidt, can be raked over the coals in clickbait headlines 10 times every season.

And of course all this feigned thinkpiecing has hardly been confined to objectionable content exclusively. This cottage industry also includes the rampant strain of theorizing that over the last several years has plagued True Detective, Westworld and The Leftovers, among countless others. Writers may gravitate to dissent for the thrill of the polemic (and because editors love to publish hate-reads), but conspiratorial super- analyses of the “this one shocking detail you may have missed in last night’s episode” variety are no less dubious – and reek just as much of desperation.

We are bound to endure another round of such disquisitions as Game of Thrones returns this weekend. What we are far less likely to see, however, is serious, reasoned analysis, or long, in-depth considerations of form, or attempts to reckon with how the series works rather than What It Means – in other words, we won’t see much actual criticism. That’s because, as any critic not labouring beneath a rock- heavy daily deadline will tell you, criticism is difficult work: it takes time, not only to write but to think, and it cannot be churned out the morning after an hour-long installment airs merely to satiate an appetite for content.

That’s the real problem with Game of Thrones as a machine that generates offence: the urgency that impels people to spot the outrage precludes the real work of criticism. It makes it impossible for writers to think hard and think seriously about what they’re watching – and instead makes them sniff out doggedly whatever might qualify as Too Far. The real machine is the system that demands its constant supply of content, of hot-takes and think-pieces on the fly. That machine generates nothing but manufactured crises, disingenuous complaints: outrage whipped up for a paycheque.

BAD THINGS ARE WRITTEN ABOUT AS THOUGH THEY’RE ENDORSED. IT’S AN EPIDEMIC OF FAKE MORALIZING.