World Screen @ 35: Game of Thrones—Movielike TV

As World Screen celebrates its 35th anniversary, we want to present a series of articles that recap and highlight the best of the interviews we have conducted. We are focusing on the evolution of scripted TV series.

In our last article, we looked at HBO after The Sopranos, and how the premium pay service found new shows that met the high standards set by the seminal drama. Today, we look at the phenomenon that was Game of Thrones.

GAME OF THRONES—MOVIELIKE TV
If The Sopranos raised the quality bar for scripted drama to the stratosphere, Game of Thrones propelled it beyond the Solar System. The series premiered in 2011, based on George R.R. Martin’s book The Song of Fire and Ice. First-time showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss adapted it and brought cinematic qualities to serialized TV drama. To tell the story of House Lannister, House Stark and House Targaryen’s battle to gain control of the land of Westeros, while the dreaded “winter is coming” loomed ahead, Game of Thrones shot in Northern Ireland, Iceland, Croatia, Morocco, Malta, Spain and Canada. On-location sites combined with intricate sets and jaw-dropping special effects brought to life scenes of epic battles, frozen landscapes, castle intrigues, plotting and killings. And of course, the famous three flying dragons, Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion.

Lasting eight seasons, and winning 58 Emmys, Game of Thrones quickly became arguably the most popular show on the planet. Avid fans faithfully followed the fights, loves, challenges and dangers endured by the cerebral, eloquent Tyrion (played by Peter Dinklage), angsty, resurrected Jon Snow, (Kit Harrington), formidable mother of dragons, Daenerys (Emilia Clarke), ruthless, incestuous Cersei (Lena Hadley), young, fearless Arya (Maisie Williams) and poor, poor Sansa (Sophie Turner.)

Following the presumed death of Jon Snow at the end of season five in 2015, the worldwide web struggled to support the traffic created by incredulous, despairing fans expressing outrage and searching for spoilers.

That summer, I interviewed Jeffrey Bewkes, who was CEO of Time Warner, the parent company of HBO. I complained that my teenage daughter was spending too much time on the Internet looking for clues to Snow’s survival instead of working on her college entrance essay. Bewkes said his son was doing the same, much to his despair. He joked that Jon Snow’s body was being kept in a storage freezer in the Time Warner headquarters, which I took as a veiled clue we would see more of him.

During that same interview, Bewkes acknowledged that Game of Thrones was movielike television, from the production values to the budget. In later seasons, episodes cost a reported $10 million. “In TV, like so many have said, we have a golden age in terms of the quality and caliber of the writers, directors and actors. You have budgets in TV now—think of Game of Thrones—that are on the level of major theatrical releases. So the quality and number of shows and hours are going up. For consumers, it means being familiar and satisfied with a favorite brand, whether it’s HBO, TNT, or whichever network brings you fresh shows. Then, finding which ones are good and which ones you don’t think are good becomes more and more important.”

People around the world, whether they subscribed to HBO or not, found Game of Thrones. It was the most pirated show in the world, not only during its run but also, according to some reports, during the early months of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.

Game of Thrones, however, was a huge subscription driver. As Michael Lombardo, then HBO’s head of programming, said in 2012. “Our shows don’t have to be everyone’s favorite, but they’d better be somebody’s favorite. When someone is making a decision every month whether or not to continue paying for HBO, there has to be something on our service that they just can’t imagine not having every month. For some people, that show is a mini-series like Mildred Pierce, an original film like Too Big to Fail, boxing or series like True Blood and Game of Thrones.

SUDDEN STARDOM
Many of the actors were relatively unknown before joining Game of Thrones. Emilia Clarke, who had had a role in the British drama Doctors before being cast as Daenerys, said in a 2015 interview that she learned so much from her experience on Game of Thrones and from fellow actors. “When I was at drama school, we had one acting-for-camera class [and they] just showed us a Michael Caine video that told us how to hit our mark. I really didn’t have a lot of camera experience before coming into this. I have learned everything that I know about acting for camera and about how a set works and operates and the best kind of behavior that you can have as an actor within that set in a very safe environment. I feel very safe and helped by absolutely every member of the cast and crew, really. Especially since I had Iain Glen [who plays Jorah Mormont] as my confidant for so long. He really did spend a lot of his time mentoring me, Emilia, as much as Jorah does mentoring Daenerys. My goodness, he knows the ropes! Many an epiphany after a discussion with Mr. Iain Glen!”

Clarke had read George R.R. Martin’s books before stepping on set. “The first book especially was akin to a Bible for me. I took it everywhere, absolutely everywhere, and reread and reread and reread. Then, as I grew in confidence after that first season, I have leant on the books less. Mainly because to understand the work, you really need to pay homage to and understand the world that George R. R. Martin has created, but as the television show has moved on apace, as an actor, it is important for you to be as present on the set as you are thinking about the book. Otherwise, you’re doing a disservice to the both of them, because you could spend too much time thinking about what affected you in the narration of one of the chapters that George has written, then you’re suddenly forgetting that it’s 4 o’clock in a Croatian desert with [hundreds of] people and having David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] asking when I’m gonna say my line! So we’ve grown to a place of accepting the Game of Thrones world, the show, as the new Bible.”

She said the attention to detail in all aspects of the production, including the costumes, helped her physically and mentally enter the role of Khaleesi. That precision also made some of the scenes as daunting to her as they were for viewers. She described shooting the scene when Daenerys met the Unsullied warriors during season five, “just as frightening as it looks. Truly, I really mean it. It’s really one of the most daunting scenes I’ve had, speaking at length in one of our made-up languages to a lot of people. You truly have to take on every memory you have of politicians speaking at rallies, or in Congress, or Parliament, or whatever it is, and in that moment, think, Emilia, get the attention of 300, 400 people. That, again, does so much for not needing to be consciously thinking about acting. You’re kind of very much in the moment, and reacting to how they are, and catching someone’s eye and seeing them wander, you’re like, Wait! I’ve got to get them back! So it’s definitely incredibly daunting, and they’re always the scariest scenes. Especially in that heat, with that wig!”

As for the scenes with the dragons, “Well, they’re always wonderful because they’re always incredibly heartfelt,” said Clarke. “You just have to get rid of any embarrassment as an actor and really harness as much conviction as you can to truly care about the big green sock while the rest of the crew is looking at you earnestly discussing your love of this big green thing! But I do have a huge soft spot for my babies! It’s just as well because the scenes are so abstract when you film them that you have to kind of zone out and see what the audience will see.”

Despite all the awards and accolades, Game of Thrones was criticized for its excessive portrayal of blood and gore and sexual violence. When I addressed the issue of rape scenes, Clarke’s answer was candid. “Violence and rape are sorry aspects of our society, and when having this discussion about what Game of Thrones is saying about violence and rape, we need to discuss whether we’re talking about the Western world or the rest of the world because it’s two different discussions. I also think that Game of Thrones is depicting a moment in history where the rights of men and women were very different, and it’s definitely commenting upon that. I think it’s good that it’s bringing those topics to the table for people to discuss, but I don’t think that the show, myself, or any of the actors involved believe that it belies our true feelings about the real world—the violence and rape that happens day to day. Ultimately it is a fantasy show. Yes, it’s got a huge amount of shock factor, but that really is characteristic of the show in trying to depict a reality of that time.”

In 2015, Clarke was still coming to grips with stardom, although she benefitted from the fact that in real life, she a brunette. Not resembling Daenerys, she could maintain some semblance of privacy. “Yeah! I’m really lucky,” she said. It’s weird; airports are a nightmare. In airports I can’t seem to come out of the loo without someone going, “Oh my God!” I went to this literary festival in Cornwall, and I was there for two days, wandering around with my pint of cider, and I just had two or three people the whole time [come up to me]. They were terribly British and middle class about it and really funny, apart from one guy who said, “Aren’t you ‘What’s Her Tits’ of that show?” and I was like, “What name? What name is ‘What’s Her Tits’?” and he was like “I don’t know, ‘What’s Her Tits’” and I was like “Oh, bad for you, I don’t know who you’re talking about.” I was mildly insulted, being referred to as “What’s Her Tits!” But other than that, I really am so lucky to have an incredibly normal life outside of filming. I’m very happy with that.”

Many fans were disappointed in the series’ ending and Daenerys’s demise when she succumbed to the Targaryen family’s “madness” and destroyed King’s Landing, killing most everyone in her wake. Nevertheless, Game of Thrones remains the series that brought cinema to television production.

Just as with The Sopranos, after Game of Thrones ended, viewers and industry insiders were asking how HBO could possibly keep up that level of quality and investment. Game of Thrones ended in 2019. By then, HBO had a new parent company, AT&T, which had already decreed HBO had to increase its output as management had its sights set on a streaming platform, HBO Max, that would leverage the HBO brand.

In an interview in 2020, Casey Bloys, the chief content officer of HBO and HBO Max, who had been at HBO since 2004, said, “After Game of Thrones went off the air, there was some of that ‘Oh my God, what is HBO going to do?’ thinking. And then we were able to say, Here’s Chernobyl. Here’s Big Little Lies season two. Here’s Euphoria. Here’s Succession season two. Here’s Watchmen. That pretty much put an end to the ‘What’s HBO going to do?’ questions! [Laughs] We were able to show you what we were going to do. And that was only possible because of the increase in programming and resources.”

“We made a big jump; we increased our scripted programming by 50 percent from 2018 to 2019,” continued Bloys. “That’s when everybody had questions about the quality of the programming. It usually takes about two years’ turnaround time from when you say you want to increase programming to when you have the programming. It takes time to develop and produce and finally get these shows to air. So probably around 2017, it started to get much busier within the programming and production groups at HBO, and then, by extension, in all the other departments…the important thing is we did it slowly. We didn’t go overboard in terms of the amount of programming we were targeting and the number of people we were adding. It was a big increase, but we were able to manage it carefully.”

HBO was not the only premium service to shape the cultural conversation with its dramas. In our next post, we look at Showtime and at some of the A-list talent it attracted.