Tuned In: Are HBO And ‘Game Of Thrones’ Trashing TV Drama?

Tuned In is Junkee’s new fortnightly column, from TV critic Maddie Palmer.

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Remember how excited we all were? How clever we all felt? For years we’d bragged about not having a TV (while secretly mainlining Felicity), and now all of a sudden television was the cleverest kid in the class.

It’s easy to forget that HBO was once known for childrens’ programming and offbeat sketch comedy. It wasn’t until 1997 with the launch of Oz that it dipped its toes into the bloody, violent pool of drama, and the year after broadcast Sex and the City to remind us that premium cable could be much more explicit about sex too.

But then The Sopranos debuted in 1999, and suddenly there was a taste of the heights HBO could reach — not just unbleeped expletives and unblurred areola, but a show genuinely far too strange to exist on a network. Stories that suggest the American Dream is fundamentally flawed tend not to be favourable with advertisers; families falling apart and a traditional culture being poisoned by betrayal do not inspire aspirational yearning for family cars and airline loyalty schemes.

The Sopranos was when we came out of the closet as unabashed TV lovers. Six Feet Under (2001) was even more subversive; on TV we tend to see characters murdered each week, but for the first time we witnessed the aftermath of death outside of mystery and revenge, and watched those left behind struggle with grief, anger, and pointlessness. Not once did a character lament that they only wished they had made their choice of phone plan more carefully. (I saw Six Feet Under on commercial TV in Australia in the prime viewing slot of 11.50pm, and awkwardly shoehorned into arbitrary act breaks was the most bizarre collection of ads I have ever seen; what do people who stay up until midnight on a Monday to watch a show about death want to buy? I remember tyres being a big thing.)

As cinemas reentered the age of the blockbuster franchise with Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Mission Impossible and Star Wars (again), it became increasingly obvious that it was special effects and spectacle which ruled the silver screen. It had chased character drama and obstacles more internal than explosive to our homes, where having these families and colleagues visit our living rooms each week afforded a complexity of character and moral ambiguity that even the ever-bloated runtimes of blockbusters could not find room for.

The Wire, now widely recognised as The Greatest Television Show Of All Time (if you plan of arguing this point please arm yourself with body armour, a bottle of whiskey, and a patience for hearing the phrase, ‘but it’s a metaphor for AMERICA!’ over and over), took to task the various armies in the War On Drugs, fearlessly exposing decades of government policy that created and reinforced class, race, and gender divides. Both sides lost their families, community and sometimes their lives in the fight which was neverending and unwinnable. (And it really was a metaphor for America.)

So… what happened? This morning we were all sniffing and coughing theatrically to pre-empt an earlymark, all so we could return to Westeros. Game of Thrones is continually surprising (except yes, for those of you who have read the books, congratulations, shut up now, we can all read), gloriously bombastic, unflinchingly violent, and stacked with stacked hotties. It’s all boobs and dragons, and who can have too many of those? (Collectively I mean; even in a place as bonkers as Westeros, everybody seems to be in agreement that two is really the ideal number of either, individually speaking).

It’s all great fun, but does it represent the deftly woven character drama that made HBO’s name? Of course it is ridiculous to judge a show on any grounds other than what it sets out to achieve, so criticising Game Of Thrones for being unsubtle is no more astute an observation than pointing out that Mozart’s music was low on riffs, or that Clockwork Orange is a bad date movie (which it absolutely is, as I found out studying both film and the boys that studied film as an undergraduate). It’s just that it embodies the factors that drove viewers from movies to TV in the first place: a preference for elaborate setpieces, swashbuckling swords and spectacle; killing over kitchen sinks. It is, at its basest level, blockbuster TV.

It’s also not the only culprit; Newsroom was all about pontificating pompous people with terrible taste in men and music, and always went for the Big Moment rather than the challenging one. The characters of Boardwalk Empire took years to step out of the gorgeously sumptuous window dressing and come to life. And (while I know I am in the minority here) expansive tracking shots and evocative scoring aside, True Detective was intellectually hollow, adolescent, brotime bullshit. All circles are flat, Rust Cohle. All of them.

This isn’t to say that HBO is no longer producing interesting and difficult programs. Their comedy chops are still consistently on display, with bitingly funny satire in Veep and Silicon Valley, and Girls, the sadly defunct Bored To Death and Enlightened show a willingness to straddle the fence between comedy and drama, to often uncomfortable but strangely evocative effect. (Much, it should be noted, like straddling an actual fence.) It’s been years since their drama has been that difficult or disquieting.

Thankfully, other networks have stepped in to fill the void. AMC has consistently produced great character drama, most notably Breaking Bad and the evocative, if occasionally maddening, Mad Men. Networks have stepped up to the plate with The Good Wife, quietly filling a standard legal procedural with a collection of some of the most interesting women on TV, and Hannibal, which is a far more interesting, more stylish, more nuanced version of True Detective, as well as having elaborate food porn sequences that would put My Kitchen Rules to shame. FX airs The Americans, which explores marriage, family, and American culture with a sophistication easily equalling the shows that made HBO’s name. So why isn’t it on HBO?

I’d hazard a guess that when your tagline is ‘it’s not TV, it’s HBO’, you may have misunderstood what made you great; the network came into its own by showing us people whose lives pivoted around things that happened in their bedrooms, their kitchens, their places of work; like most of our lives do. We all have moments of bravery and weakness, but they rarely involve swords or the national interest. Rarely are we forced to make decisions that could mean the difference between literal life and death, but the quiet and barely perceptible space between a life that feels fulfilling, or the death of living one that doesn’t.

This is the drama that is missing from HBO, and I miss it dearly.

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Season five of Game of Thrones airs on Showcase at 11am Monday, with an encore broadcast at 7.30pm.

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Maddie Palmer is a writer, broadcaster, and TV and digital producer. Her work has appears on The Feed on SBS2, and she talks about TV with Myf Warhurst on Double Jay. She tweets from @msmaddiep.