Week-to-Week: Hello again, Westeros

As one spinoff ends, another begins, with a considerable amount of baggage

Photo: HBO

Earlier this week, Donna Bowman ended a 14 ½-year odyssey in Albuquerque with her final review of AMC’s Better Call Saul here at Episodic Medium, capping off her coverage of both that series and its predecessor, Breaking Bad. In following the discussion on both her article discussing her experience writing about the show and her review of the finale itself, it was amazing to see how the sum total of this experience resonated for critics and viewers alike—fellow Episodic Medium contributor Zack Handlen captures the essence here, itching to jump back into this universe.

Zack Handlen @zhandlen

okay, but do i rewatch Better Call Saul first or rewatch Breaking Bad first, and how does watching El Camino fit into all of this.

It was also constructive to be thinking about this as I prepare for the next stage in my own decade-plus journey with a television franchise. Just as Donna is saying goodbye to Albuquerque, I’m preparing to say hello again to Westeros with Sunday’s debut of House of the Dragon, the first of what promises to be many efforts by HBO to recapture the magic of their most successful series ever. And as someone who first wrote about the channel’s efforts to adapt A Song of Ice and Fire thirteen years ago, and who reviewed every episode across my blog Cultural Learnings and The A.V. Club, and who even wrote the official companion to the entire series, this first spinoff is a momentous occasion.

But it’s not the same type of moment as the Albuquerque sendoff, and returning to Westeros comes with perhaps unprecedented baggage for myself and everyone who spent the better part of a decade in the trenches of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ take on George R.R. Martin’s gritty fantasy.

Earlier this summer, Polygon asked me to write a preview of House of the Dragon helping non-readers prepare for its debut, and I understood why: although I had written reviews that straddled the line between a reader and non-reader perspective for the first four seasons, in the fifth season I took over the “Experts” reviews at The A.V. Club from Emily St. James. That distinction between “Newbies” and “Experts” grew silly once the show progressed beyond Martin’s published books, but it stuck around because it was inherent to how distinct the show was from the very beginning. Here was an adaptation where the source material had so many significant twists and so much expected diversion based on the shift to a new medium that two different reviewers were required to reflect viewers’ own relationship to the show.

The preamble developed for “Experts” reviews at The A.V. Club

Eleven years later, though, those same frameworks no longer feel relevant as the show’s spinoff is set to debut. There’s a number of reasons for this. My contribution to Polygon’s summer preview evolved into discussing one: I haven’t read Fire & Blood—the book House of the Dragon is based on—because it’s a diegetic history instead of a novel, and I imagine the same is true for many who identified as book readers during Game of Thrones’ run. But a related issue was that I didn’t read it in part because I was burned out on being a “book reader,” and the discourse it created online, and reentering that willingly seems like a profoundly bad idea:

But as time went on, and the show veered further away from the story in the books, we had dug ourselves so deep into the Lady Stoneheart of it all that the ability to just watch and enjoy the show on its own merits felt out of reach. And when the show passed the books, we couldn’t dig ourselves out, struggling to grapple with the phantom of Martin’s unfinished volumes and take in the final season as something other than a purple-monkey-dishwasher rendition of his intended ending. Being a book reader became a burden, and I envied those who could just get angry on the internet about the finale as just a reaction to a TV show and not as A Whole Thing About The Books.

— This Summer, Be Free of the Need to Read Fire & Blood (Polygon)

But even if we wanted to make this about newbies and experts, the reality is that a broadly defined binary is incapable of capturing the sheer chaos of viewers’ relationship to Westeros following the final season(s) of Game of Thrones. It’s not simply that there is a strong contingent that swore off the franchise altogether following the show’s ending¹—it’s also that there are others who were with it to the bitter end, and an incredible gradient of perspectives in between. There’s no question that the kind of emotional groundswell that ushered out Better Call Saul did not materialize upon Thrones’ conclusion three years ago given the backlash, but it is equally untrue to suggest that backlash was universal.

Making and marketing a spinoff of a show with such a polarized reputation is a tightrope walk, as Joe Adalian broke down in Vulture's Buffering newsletter: the goal of any good spinoff is to capture the essence of the thing people love, but not only is that love not universal, but the disagreement is predicated on what, exactly, the essence of the show was. Without the ability to bring over a character (this time around, we’ll see what Beyond The Wall with Jon Snow looks like), HBO settled on a family we recognize, which just so happens to be the one with giant fire-breathing dragons that are certainly iconographic for Game of Thrones if not necessarily the core of the story. I don’t know that HBO has managed to create a clear idea of what this show is on its own merits, exactly, but they have successfully tapped into the sense that Westeros is a place we once enjoyed spending time, and it feels like people are willing to at least step across the border to sample another period in its history.

From a critical perspective, though, it’s a tightrope walk as well. It seems like the Internet Content Apparatus is spooling up around House of the Dragon just as it did for Game of Thrones, and while I understand why that’s happening—and am obviously part of this by writing about it here at Episodic Medium—I legitimately don’t know if any show could hold up to that level of scrutiny. The discourse around Game of Thrones was fundamentally singular: its literary fantasy origins inspired deep, intense fandoms, while its mainstream success drew widespread coverage, with the initial Newbie and Expert audiences expanding into clans and factions that outlets had no reason to tame given how many page views it was generating. But just copy and pasting what David Chen and Kim Renfro at Decoding TV describe as a “content ecosystem” from one show to another seems like a recipe for disaster, or at the very least a brand of chaos not far removed from the one we left behind in 2019.

Personally, this is why I have chosen to approach House of the Dragon as Just Another TV Show. Yes, my perspective will no doubt be shaped by my long-term relationship with Game of Thrones, and A Song of Ice and Fire, but I want—and perhaps need—the show to exist on its own merits. And so there won’t be Newbies or Experts, and there won’t be special stray observations dedicated to what happened in the book, and I’m hopeful that it won’t just be a laundry list of ways it is different from or similar to its predecessor.

And yet at the same time, it can’t not be that, because until the show makes its own case, the only reason House of the Dragon exists is because of Game of Thrones. That’s how spinoffs work, and this might well be the most high profile and high stakes spinoff of all time, fraught with the future of a franchise the newly christened Warner Bros. Discovery believes is critical to its existence. This isn’t just about the future of TV shows set in Westeros—it’s the future of licensing deals, whether for shirts or Funko Pops or a book like the one I wrote, and which I imagine the publisher expected would do far better than it did before the reaction to the final season came into focus.² They won’t only get one shot at making a successful spinoff—there’s so many more to come—but they only have one opportunity to make a statement that we should be excited rather than apprehensive at the thought of returning to Westeros.

And while I may not be feeling as warmly nostalgic as Donna was earlier in the week, I will say that I am excited about the potential for this space here at Episodic Medium to foster an engaged, dynamic discussion about the show in the weeks ahead. Thus far, this has proven to be a space where a diverse range of perspectives can come together in productive conversation, and that seems like the ideal space to work through the cultural project of a spin-off of the most successful, strikingly divisive television show of all time. I’m looking forward to hearing where y’all land on the spectrum of feelings about the frnachise’s return more than I’m looking forward to the show itself.

Episodic Observations

• Provided screener access remains consistent, I should have reviews for House of the Dragon up just after the episode’s initial airing on Sunday nights—that is, of course, subject to change, but things should be set up to make Episodic Medium your first stop after the episode finishes.

• Isn’t it fun that we’re going to go through a whole new round of this discourse in two weeks’ time? If you missed it, Zack Handlen will be on the Rings of Power beat come September 2.

• I finished up the Netflix limited series Keep Breathing this week—I didn’t realize it was only six episodes (I had mentally pegged it at 8 for some reason), so it really is a breezy watch, and interesting for how it resists overstaying its welcome. The blur between the present survival scenario and the flashbacks is well-calibrated, and while you may be disappointed if you invest in some of the setup early on that doesn’t necessarily evolve as it would in a longer series, I thought the ending worked overall to the message the show was presenting. This type of limited series has never really had a huge market before streaming, so I’m curious if Netflix wants more in this vein.

• I also started the third season of Never Have I Ever, which I’ll write about in next week’s newsletter, because I’m four episodes in and have some thoughts about some of the broader narrative choices thus far.

1. And they’re all on dating apps using it for prompts, from what I could tell.

2. I have no idea how it sold, to be honest, but you can hear more about my experience writing it in this episode of Culturally Relevant with David Chen.