I mentioned a couple of months ago that I was Re-watching Game of Thrones and I was reminded just how good that show was – especially those early seasons. By Binge-ing all the seasons back-to-back over a couple of weeks it was very easy for me to see where the show dropped off. Facebook has been feeding me GoT content now for many months with lots of pretty pictures of the actors, but they don’t quite get it. It’s not the actors that made the show great, it was the plot twists and most importantly – the clever dialogue.
Re-watching GoT set me up nicely to watch the new spin-off series House of the Dragon and, to be brutally honest it’s about as good as the final seasons of GoT and that’s probably being generous. All the basic ingredients of a decent fantasy story are there, but it’s missing those special ingredients that made the original GoT so good. The dialogue is pretty weak and the characters are fairly one-dimensional. While I could watch GoT and relate to / enjoy many of the complex characters in that show, the characters of House of the Dragon are for the most part pretty ordinary and uninspiring.
It feels like it’s the same band of Hollywood writers hacks trying to churn out some more derivative content and ride the coat-tails of a previous winner. That seems to be the trend these days and we’re seeing it with all the Star Wars spin-offs, the glut of Marvel and DC comic remakes and it looks like Lord of the Rings is going down this road too. For Game of Thrones they doing another spin-off for Jon Snow and that looks like more of the same...
That said, I’ll still probably watch it just like I’m watching House of the Dragon because I am a sucker for the fantasy genre. However, I think there is a real dearth of quality, creative entertainment being created these days so the bar is pretty low. We used Covid and the Writers Strike as an excuse for weak content production in recent years, but I’m not seeing an improvement. Remakes and Spin-Offs seem to be everywhere these days as US show makers appear to be in decline. Will we see a Renaissance of creativity at some point? I hope so because I love a good story...
EDIT - Another GoT spin-off has just been announced A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
