T w e n t y S i d e d
This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both.
After finishing my review of season eight, I decided to give the internet a week or two to cool down. Sure, they’re sour on the show now, I thought, but this may be the worst of it. This will be a valuable thing to study. I’ve seen fandoms turn on things before – Lost, Dexter, Mass Effect, The Walking Dead – and was starting to fancy myself an expert. My ambitions! Perhaps I would be the first one to develop a workable Grand Unified Theory of Internet Meltdowns!
I’ve since scaled those ambitions down. Near as I can tell, people get cranky when they’re made to expect a quality product and then don’t recieve it, and with the advent of the internet the effective broadcasting range for crankiness is measured in the thousands of miles. The subreddit r/freefolk, which is probably the densest concentration of dissatisfaction, is still going strong, strong enough that they may see out the end of the summer before petering off.
Like its predecessors, I don’t expect it will have much tangible effect on the property itself. Some have mused if Disney will reconsider giving Star Wars to Benioff and Weiss. I doubt it. From management’s perspective, Game of Thrones did its job, in that it made a lot of money and drew a lot of subscribers and attention to HBO. Disney might even like this, on the “any publicity is good publicity” principle, though I would advise them to keep an eye on the writing process for the upcoming movies. The first in their Star Wars series is supposed to come out in 2022, which won’t be long enough to recycle their reputations. And the fact that they submitted “The Iron Throne” for a writing Emmy doesn’t suggest they’re eager to learn from this experience. (God, it’s going to win, isn’t it? The “bad pussy” episode won a writing Emmy, remember.)
So will all the sound and fury, in the end, have signified nothing? Not the way I see it. These sorts of things always gave the impression of a storm to me. As a storm is chaotic activity meant to correct a meteorological imbalance, the internet backlash is chaotic activity meant to correct a collective emotional imbalance. People invested in the show, and when they don’t get the return they feel they were promised, they look for it elsewhere. There’s comraderie to be found in collaborative griping, not to mention entertainment value. There’s an entire library of people dissecting season eight. I’ll just post the pitch meeting as a sample, because I happen to like these things:
Link (YouTube) |
There may be more shoes to drop yet. Game of Thones is currently said to have no fewer than three “successor shows”They don’t like to call them ‘spinoffs.’ in the works, including one that’s gotten as far as the casting stage. Three spinoffs would be a pretty big ask even if the show had ended on a high note. Instead, they’ll have some audience goodwill to recoup before they even start. And never mind just the Game of Thrones-branded stuff – there’s a project to adapt the Wheel of Time series, and an on-again, off-again Conan the Barbarian show in and out of the works. Thanks to the entertainment industry’s well-documented copycat tactics, we’re about to find out just how much fantasy fiction the market can bear. I predict unhappy investors in the future, but I’ve been wrong before. I thought the superhero movie thing was going to peter out years ago. Shows what I know.
I feel pretty safe in predicting none of them will have the reach or popularity of the original series. Game of Thrones may end up being the apotheosis of the so-called “peak TV” era. There’ll be other shows as good and better, but I can’t see any of them them reaching this level of cultural ubiquity again for the forseeable future.
I have no idea if that’s a good or bad thing. I’m all for variety, and there was always a sort of bullying quality to these behemoth shows. People end up watching them out of fear of missing out, or because they don’t want to spend the next decade not getting this reference or that one. What’s more, their commercial success is used as a bludgeon against criticism.
At the same time, there’s value to be had in a sort of cultural communion, and in shared experience that allusions can draw on. An example: one of my various curiosities is the intelligence trade, and I’ve already noticed that a certain espionage trick, different versions of which have been called the “barium meal test” or the “canary trap,” is now sometimes referred to as “pulling a Tyrion” by spy-novel fans. A generation from now, “Arya” might be considered a perfectly normal name. Stranger things have happened.
Barring any crazy developments, this will be it for Game of Thrones criticism on my end. I’d like to thank everyone that read and commented, and to Shamus for hosting it. Next up: a series on the past and newly-minted future of the Baldur’s Gate series.
Footnotes:
[1] They don’t like to call them ‘spinoffs.’
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
The Best of 2018
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
I’ve been disappointed in most of GoT since the books endeed, but I’m still (smewhat) intwrested.in the prequel shows. Hospefullt WoT series will be betrer
You okay there friend? I know thinking about GoT too much makes me a little woozy too, but that was an intense descent into nonsense.
Call an ambulance!
No wait – he’s just posting from the phone. Drunk.
Ding! We have a winner! :D
LOTR might do fine on the strength of the first trilogy, but ask Mass Effect (Bioware more generally), BSG, and Lost what happens to the franchise if the ending is bad enough. The fact they had the audacity to submit the finale for a writing Emmy is appalling: the fact there are people who actually consider it genius writing is terrifying.
At the end of the day, the spectacle draws the crowd, much as how spectacle drove plebs to the Colosseum, and smart writers will need to come to grips with that.
To be honest I don’t think people submitting episodes for Emmy consideration really think specifically about the writing quality within that episode as opposed to its place within the season’s story. The best episode writing-wise is probably episode 2, but I imagine that episode 6 was chosen because it was the finale and the other two episodes in consideration were “battle episodes” with even less dialogue than the finale.
That said, thinking the pendulum of popular opinion, even within the people who vote for Emmys, hasn’t swung utterly against them at this point strikes me as deluded.
The deluded part might actually be imagining that internet ex-fan hate is truly the same as “popular sentiment”. Modern Family and Big Bang Theory won Emmy’s ALL THE TIME after all.
Well the Last Battle in WoT is actually a goddamn Last Battle and is written practically down to the inch, so if it makes it that far no prob. Glossing over and speeding up slow points in the mid/end of the series should be fine too, at least a few extra characters that can be culled.
No, the biggest problem is that it’s not full of nasty sex and murder. These are 18-20 something farm kids with actual morals who maintain some awkward teens-ness basically all through the deal, which does not mesh with being compared to HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Basically I think the most likely way they screw it up is by trying to cut it down and rush to the “good” parts, when the fact that it’s actually a long journey from farm boy to the Last Battle is kinda the whole point. If they frontload the relationships and turn up the sex ASAP because “game of thrones,” I expect it will undercut everything else even if they kept it otherwise strictly to the books. Although maybe the more lascivous antagonists could fulfill that, if such is the demand- but they still don’t appear for a while.
But yeah, this is a series that takes three books before any of the main characters start hero-ing on their own power without a handicap, which could be a problem.
I’m actually seeing it looking like they’re focusing on Moiraine and Lan to begin with, which is a really great place to go for a TV series, because it allows the focus to shift later on and deal with fallout of setbacks during the series. If they make the POV characters Lan and Moiraine to start with, I can see it being pretty dang good.
I’m hopeful. :)
I assume that just means starting with the prequel novel. I enjoyed that story a lot, but I’m not sure that it would make as strong of a start for the whole series. Part of what made the prequel good was already knowing the characters. If it means shifting the focus of the main story, I can’t be happy with a change that big.
I’ve seen at least one press release about this that made me question if the publishers had even read the books themselves. And I’m not looking forward to the inevitable “they’re just copying Game of Thrones” comments from the uninitiated.
Bizarrely enough, way back when I was into WoT, I would always recommend people to start with New Spring like I did. TEotW was just so boring and derivative, and the cool parts of the setting were so tangential to it, that I wouldn’t have blamed anyone for quickly checking out of it. I think what originally sold me on the series was Tar Valon as magic school meets gender-bent Vatican, as well as the vague eastern elements i.e. Lan’s samurai vibe and the Source’s Taoist overtones.
It certainly felt to me like New Spring was more competently written than the early books, and I think he had a better handle on the setting and characters by that point. But I was pretty young when I started the series, so the more derivative parts of the first book’s story didn’t occur to me at the time. I did enjoy New Spring at the point in the series when it was written because it laid out events that had been referenced so many times in the series. But it could go either way I guess.
As far as the start of a TV show, I dunno. I’ve always thought that the prologue of the first book would make an excellent opening to a movie if it was shot well. And the first few chapters involve a village being burned down by monsters, and multiple conflicts between the major characters. As much as I like New Spring, a lot of the first half is about two secondary characters running errands and filling out paperwork. Then again, they might just cut all that stuff, but that’s even worse to me.
Come to think of it, that would be something of an odd start also, because it would be revealing some concepts much earlier than they are introduced in the main series.
Hmm. That could work within the first book, it is two badasses on an escort mission with a bunch of idiot farmkids. You’d either have to skip/gloss over the step by step emotional weight of Rand’s chapters before leaving town, or do a pretty hard pivot. But focusing on Lan and Moiraine herding the kids early on, their absence when the split happens, and then them taking charge again, seems reasonable (I’ve not watched any promotional materials, I’ll go in blind). The focus in LotR (at least the movies) is much more on the badasses until the party splits (at least to my memory), and EotW is basically the same path there.
I feel some of the disappointment is that the last few seasons were such a dramatic difference in quality to the first five seasons. Alot of fans kept going on the basis of well they will make it all worth it in the end and then the showrunners didn’t. It also feels very lazy of the writers to me. So much was left out, so much never was set up properly and the last two seasons really were just one season split up. So much of what was there was also inconsistent in blatant ways that really should have been caught before the script got to screen never mind how lazy they got about the set in that last season (coffee cup on set). It’s like ordering a cake from a bakery and all the samples and tasting went great only to get a grocery store cake that is badly decorated in the end.
The first seasons were so much better than the later seasons. Remember when Ned Stark was beheaded because he threatened to cast doubt on the prince’s lineage? How it flew in the face of normal convention, that the honourable hero got his ass handed to him because he was an honorable idiot, and not just because Cercei is an unrepentant bitch?
I keep hoping the upcoming Witcher series will bring back some proper fantasy intrigue, but I feel like the majority of people just remember GoT for the spectacle of the latter half of its run instead of the actually interesting start it had that got everyone invested. I think all the wrong lessons will come of it.
I think the extra year delay kind of created false-positive expectations among enthusiastic watchers.
Whereas us cynics would see that needing extra production time for a short number of episodes spells trouble, the less cynical would be thinking that an extra year means more time to make it EVEN MORE special… and expectations are then setup to be knocked down.
I’d heard that the six episodes of season 8 were expected to be feature-length (I.e movie length per episode)… but in the end they were just a BIT longer that a normal episode.
I hate to be that guy, but…’comraderie’ isn’t a word. (Edit: by that, I mean it’s a misspelling)
As for the nature of GOT’s ubiquity, I would argue that its massive cultural reach was the exception in today’s TV climate, and that most watching habits vary widely. Having one or two cultural touchstones in an otherwise diverse landscape strikes me as a perfectly fine balance, especially compared with how television used to be.
Could someone explain the espionage/spy trick to me? I did a very cursory google and only found unrelated things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
The short version is: You think someone is leaking info, but you don’t know who. So you start selectively feeding different (and possibly false) information to all of your suspects and pay attention to what leaks out, thereby finding out who is guilty.
The same thing basically happens with spam comments, they have to be notably incorrect or their clients don’t know whose spambot is getting content through.
This Game of Thrones write-up has been great and all (it got me to start reading the books — halfway through A Storm of Swords now), but I’d be lying if I said I’m not way more excited about the Baldur’s Gate series.
Infinity Engine 4 Life!
I’m also interested in the Baldur’s Gate series, as I’ve never played any of the games. They’re on the to-do list somewhere, but I still haven’t managed to get in my copy of Placescape: Torment yet.
Old, clunky interfaces and all…
Unless you’re really into the infinity engine style combat (and from your post I assume you’re not) I recommend just bumping the difficulty down to easy and enjoying the story. I’ve replayed P:T sometime last year and I was surprised to find out that, in term of writing, not only does it hold up but it’s actually much better than I remembered it being.
Yeah, I gave up on playing the Infinity Engine games because I cannot stand the combat or the interface. I tried what you suggested but the resulting experience felt incomplete. I like story-driven RPGs despite pretty much all of them having combat that may be described as somewhere between bad and just okay. But even though the combat’s not the selling point, taking it out without anything to replace it with doesn’t really work, since it still serves a purpose i.e. establishing your character’s role, making progression meaningful, providing the story with its pacing, and so on.
Also, and I’m aware this isn’t a popular opinion, at least from what I saw the writing in P:T didn’t impress me. I realize nothing can live up to the hype, but more than a case of it not being as good as advertised, it was one of it not being particularly good, period. It strikes me as a traditional case of effective self-promotion: the writing takes itself so seriously that the audience cannot help but believe that it is indeed Serious Writing, and therefore Good. Also see: Obsidian’s modus operandi.
When you finish Storm of Swords, close it, put it in your bookshelf, and never pick up another ASOIAF book again.
I’ve checked it out from the library, so it’ll go on someone else’s shelf, but this is not the first time I have gotten this recommendation.
From a previous entry:
I hope you didn’t waste any significant brainpower on that.
Aww, the petition to remake Season 8 has stalled at about 1.6 million. I would have enjoyed watching to get to some silly-high number and watch what the show’s cast & crew made of it.
Again, I have to ask: how did they get it this wrong? The show’s ending practically wrote itself! Jamie kills Cersei wit hsad musc in the background, there’s an epic fight with Winter King at the end (not the middle), Euron Geryjoy dies as a boss battle, Dany & Jon take the throne, all wrapped up nicely, etc etc.
You might complain that that’s cliched and/or stupid, but I’ll just point you to the other stuff that the show wrote when GRRM’s material ran out – cliched and stupid never bothered them before.
I think the show was let down (in a sense) by trying to live up to the books. GRRM set up an intelligent, character-driven story/deconstruction, and the people writing the show just weren’t as good/meticulous/interested in the detail as him. But, the show still seemed to see itself (or wanted to be seen) as clever when it really, really wasn’t – even stuff taken from the books (Ygritte’s death, Jon’s betrayal by the Watch, Aegon Targaryean telling Jon to ‘kill the boy’, Tyrion’s final fight with Shae) had key details missing/changed that robbed them of their meaning/value.
They should have just embraced their limitations and made the story their way. This could have been epic schlock, or just a well-done fairly standard fantasy story…but instead, they tried to follow the books and made it a nonsensical fantasy story with irritating delusions of grandeur.
You’re not wrong. I’d find that ending disappointing, but it’d at least work.
The thing I don’t get is why Season 6 and Season 7 were so bad. They’re where the rot really came in IMO, it’s sort of like that Sherlock final season situation where things become more apparent in hindsight. Although, much like Sherlock, I got bored of this tripe as it happened and just amused myself from the sidelines. They deliberately limited themselves to 8 seasons, which was already on the short side, but fair enough, it’s harder to maintain interest for longer. Then they spent 2 out of three of the final seasons doing next to nothing, spending entire seasons rehashing the same nonconversations and having our characters being pointlessly antagonistic towards each other to eke out the drama, before a big fight scene at the tail end.
All of that wheel spinning sort of got people where they needed to be, vaguely, but very little actually happened. Most of it was fighting new antagonists who made very little thematic point, who’s place in the story was massively outsized, Ramsay, Euron. Season 5 was terrible, the Dornish plot was awful, but at least that was going somewhere, things were happening. Season 7 had a lot of attempts to set up things for the endgame, things we knew would work out so there was no drama. The dragonglass? They’re obviously going to get it, spending all this time pretending that won’t happen is silly. Dany v Cersei? Doesn’t matter, apparently Cersei has infinite forces, Euron has a massive fleet that shouldn’t exist, populated by the couple of hundred Ironborn he had, which has suddenly swelled to thousands.
What’s so confusing to me is, how they didn’t just keep moving towards basic setups and payoffs. Don’t take away Cersei’s armies just to give her new ones. Don’t try to fake us out as to whether Arya is going to murder Sansa, when we all know Sansa and Arya are going to kill Littlefinger for his part in the murder of their father. If you intend to have Cersei as a viable threat in the endgame, have her win some battles, keep her threatening, don’t just give her more armies. Don’t try to convince us Arya is actually stupid enough to kill Sansa, that’s insulting. Don’t send Sam to Oldtown just to send him straight back. Don’t spend an entire season on recruiting the northern families to fight under Jon Snow to attempt to save Rickon, we know they’re going to do it, why not go hard on “The North Remembers”, and “The King in the North” right away. Why does Cersei kill her own family and several lords of her biggest allies and get to be queen? Don’t we remember the Karstark thing? If we’re being that lazy, just put in Cleganebowl there, it’s gonna suck anyway. Don’t waste our time guessing at Margery’s plot to escape and on the Sparrow’s plotline if an explosion is going to wrap everything up with a nice bow (Seriously, the Septsplosion is terrible. The Sparrows are apparently all dead, and the largest fighting force in Westeros at this point, the Tyrell army, who Cersei has been relying on, have nothing to say about the matter). Don’t have Dany go crazy at the end, if you’re not going to put some serious effort into establishing it.
So much padding, and it didn’t even make any sense. It was obviously written off the cuff, a season at a time, but really lazily too. It would have been all to easy to have a sensible plotline that made it’s way to the end. It could still be full of bad dialogue, ninja Arya who apparently can beat Brienne in a fight *teleports behind you* “Nothing personal kid”, the garbage that is Cleganebowl, “crazy” Dany, awkward theming and poor adaptational choices, but it would have made sense, if someone had put any real thought or effort into it.
Instead our final battle happens halfway through the last season, it’s a cakewalk that kills off only side characters, many of whom are passed their use by dates, and we go back to KL to fight Cersei, her rented unlimited army, like she’s the big villain, oh actually Dany is the big villain, for very poor reasons, and we’re done. Glad you didn’t order the usual 10 episodes!
I remember when (the reimagined) Battlestar Galactica was the critically acclaimed series and its ending also disappointed a lot of viewers, and SyFy (nee Sci-Fi) still tried multiple prequel spin-offs, but nothing came close to capturing that zeitgeist again. I’ll be surprised (though pleasantly) if any of these other sword-and-sorcery series take off–I can’t see the Lord of the Rings prequel series being anywhere near as good as the film trilogy, and the source material of most of these other proposed series isn’t remotely in the same league as A Song of Ice and Fire. GOT, for all the byzantine complexity of its setting and characters, pinned itself on two straightforward plot points: who will win the Iron Throne, and “Winter is Coming”. Even viewers not well-versed in fantasy could grasp those. Will other fantasy series have a similar focal point, or just get lost in their lore?
I think something that, when it comes to long-running entertainment properties, often gets overlook by executives and industry analysts is that past a certain point people are often looking for a stepping off point from this thing they’ve invested a lot into but are getting tired of. The audience is like a big wave – the execs see the motion of the wave and assume its momentum will continue forever – without considering what the wave is seeking, ie a shoreline to crash into and then dissipate.
Good point. Season 2 of BSG a prequel going into what the Colonies’ society had been like pre disaster and the birth of the Cylons was exciting. Season 4 I just couldn’t be bothered.
The Wheel of Time show has the potential…
Simple Plot One: Simple farm boy Rand meets a Gandalf analogue who informs him that he’s the Chosen One Who Will Save Us All and so he goes on the standard journey* to realise his destiny. This turns into…
Simple Plot Two: The world has to unite to fight back against an unequivically evil Dark One, but masses of Politics, infighting, bad guy sympathisers/spies and other complications get in the way.
As long as they make the Politics interesting, keep the big Threat actually threatening, and don’t drown the central premise in bullshit and anciliary characters like the books did, the showmakers could make something good out of this.
But they could also get lost in the lore too…the books certainly did.
(To this day, I still neither know – nor care – about the difference between Tear, Cairhien and Illian. I think one of them featured women-only knife-fights?)
*It’s so standard. About four chapters into the first book his hometown even gets attacked by the setting’s Orc equivalents in order to motivate him to leave.
I used to be a huge WoT fan in my tweens. I doubt I’d like the books if I reread them nowadays (haven’t touched them in something like a decade), and I doubt I’d have even liked them back in the day if I had started with The Eye of the World instead of the prequel, New Spring. The latter was shorter (e.g. denser and more concise) and not as blatantly cliched.
As a tween I already had a low tolerance for repetition; I very quickly gave up on Drizzt, Dragonlance, and the Belgariad for being just more boring versions of Tolkien’s stuff, and didn’t think very highly of ASoIaF even then since I came to fantasy from historical fiction. But New Spring did a pretty good job deceiving me that WoT was different.
If they want the TV show to stand out, they should focus on what sets WoT apart and take it even further. Go more early modern than medieval for the costume and set design. Turn the non-European influences up to eleven. WoT was among those doing the magic school thing before Harry Potter, so make sure to go into that.
This was a great series, thanks!
I wouldn’t be so sure
As I see it Game of Thrones was three parts, one part was a response/deconstruction/subversion/etc to Lord of the Rings at a time when audiences were receptive to such, one part was being a HBO show following The Sopranos/The Wire/a million other high quality shows with small audiences building up a rep and a third part was being a high quality show (Sean Bean! Costumes! Fantasy! Writing!). People argue it was hype in the beginning but Blackwater was the first hype and they got the money off of season 1 and season 1 had no hype as we would understand it
The point is one of those points is replicable on a bigger scale, create a response/deconstruction/subversion/etc to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Bear in mind I have no idea what it could be (Watchmen is sort of it but at the same time just comes across as same but more, Cap America if he’d retired as opposed to simply being down in the dumps, and is more a response to DC comics) but if you could make that, well MCU has an even bigger cultural penetration than the Lord of the Rings films
The cultural communion remark is perhaps much more important than you realize. As entertainment and pasttimes have grown ever more diverse, it’s been both a boon and a bane. It’s a boon in the sense that, no matter how niche your hobby or interests are, the internet allows you to find and communicate with them. The feeling of “I’m not alone!” is an incredibly powerful one, and I dare say, without hyperbole, finding that little community of like-minded souls has probably been the only thing standing between life and death for some people.
On the other hand, now that you HAVE your own “people”, it also means that you can afford to withdraw from everyone else. As society becomes ever more fragmented and people retreat to their own little bubbles, it means that we have less and less in common with our neighbours, and the less we have in common, the more we start to see them as being “not us”. (It takes only a little more nudging to turn that “not us” into “the enemy”, which is why I think society is so polarized nowadays.) We’ve lost that ability to come together at school/around the water cooler at work on Monday and go “Hey, what did you guys think of the last Simpsons episode? Man, I can’t believe Maggie shot Mr Burns!” and have everybody immediately know what you’re talking about. Everybody is so lost in their own little worlds that we no longer bother to go out and learn about other people’s worlds, if only because there just wasn’t anything else to do/watch on TV.
So yes, I think these cultural communions are actually WAY more important to the cohesion of a society than we realize.
The way I see it, the rage mostly left its place to nothing. People aren’t wistful about GoT, upset that it’s over like they would have been two years ago, they’re just over it. Which is not great news for the prequels, and not great news for that emmy (which are often more dependent on the zeitgeist than actual quality).
Also I am psyched for that Baldur’s Gate series!
Oooooooh! Exciting! My favourite vidyagame series ever.
I’ve not got a clue what a Baldur’s Gate III is going to meaningfully add (given that there is nowhere to take the plot, and in terms of spiritual successors, Pillars of Eternity already exists) but I’m highly excited about a retrospective of the originals.
To me, the biggest threat to a successor series to Game of Thrones is the new splintering streaming model. And I mean this in a very specific way. Tons of obscure stuff is getting created and funded decently enough, it’s a good time to be a fan of novels or comics. Wheel of Time is getting a show, The Witcher is getting a show, 2nd tier Marvel and Star Wars characters are getting shows, indy comics (like Outcast, Nimona, and Deadly Class) are getting shows, etc. And that’s great, imo!
But, while networks are willing to create and show off this stuff, they seem very unwilling to let them develop. Netflix seems to be developing an unspoken “three seasons then cancelled” rule, no matter how the shows in question are being received. The changing situation with Disney killed off the entire Netflix Marvel line, and I think most people would agree that while some of those shows deserved it perhaps, certainly not all of them did, not at the same time. Amazon killed off The Tick after releasing a great Season One… Part 1. Then dribbling out Season 1 Part 2 (stop with this ‘Part’ shit, it’s AWFUL) and Season 2 with MUCH less ad backing and notice from the community. I suspect the Boys might also get a quick season or two and then go bye bye. Deadly Class came out and then was immediately killed off. On DC Universe, Swamp Thing basically came out pre-cancelled which was odd considering the reviews for it were extremely positive out of the gate. From internet rumoring, it seems that the very well received Doom Patrol could also land on the chopping block. HBO was bought out by AT&T and their first business meeting was “Hey, let’s stop doing all the things that have made us a powerful and popular force in the media industry to chase the dragon of being Netflix!” So that might be… quite awful.
With all that mayhem, will any of these shows have the stickiness to even last to season 8 to disappoint people? Supernatural is like 15 seasons in, meanwhile, the Divergent TV show couldn’t even get a pilot season.
It has been great to read your articles. I hope you continue to release articles and perhaps some youtube videos in the future.
In any case thank you.