Why Prestige Dramas Like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘True Dete... http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/tru...

TheAtlantic.com uses cookies to enhance your experience when visiting

Accept cookies
the website and to serve you with advertisements that might interest you.
By continuing to use this site, you agree to our use of cookies.
Find out more here.

CULTURE

The Unbearable
Darkness of Prestige
Television
Critically acclaimed genre series such as Game of Thrones and
True Detective are using bleak self-seriousness to distance
themselves from their lowbrow roots.

Lacey Terrell / HBO

ELIZABETH ALSOP | JUL 8, 2015

1 of 9 10/07/2015 1:50 pm
Why Prestige Dramas Like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘True Dete... http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/tru...

Never has California seemed as gloomy as it does in the premiere of

True Detective’s second season. It would be hard to choose the episode’s
darkest moment—was it the near-suicidal nighttime motorcycle ride?
The sad blowjob? The brutal beating of a man in front of his son, by a
cop whose own child may be the result of an unsolved rape? So far, at
least three of the show’s main characters are so dour, drunk, and
all-around dyspeptic, they make the denizens of film noir look
positively chipper by comparison.

And yet, such moodiness is far from

RELATED STORY an anomaly. Consider how many
other current acclaimed shows
cultivate a similarly somber mood.
From the bro-style bloviating (or,
broviating) of True Detective’s first
season, to the ominous proclaiming
that punctuates the general
The Golden Age of TV and the Rise of whoring and slaying of Game of
the Antihero Thrones, to the unceasing
climatological and psychological
punishments meted out to the cast
of The Killing, it seems as though some of the most celebrated recent
examples of serial drama have elected self-seriousness as their default
tone. Especially paradigmatic of this drift toward the ponderous is The
Walking Dead, whose third season includes episodes entitled “Made to
Suffer,” “The Suicide King,” and “This Sorrowful Life”—titles that
could just as easily characterize the despondent state of affairs on any
number of shows viewers and critics alike have been singling out for
praise. Game of Thrones, for instance, killed off one of its most jovial
characters, Robert Baratheon, in the seventh episode, and with him,
seemingly any hope of ensuring the series’s main players—in the words
of the murdered king—“don’t look so fucking grim all the time.” It’s as

2 of 9 10/07/2015 1:50 pm
Why Prestige Dramas Like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘True Dete... http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/tru...

if these programs, intent on proving their “quality,” fall into the trap of
protesting too much.

This new strain of humorlessness comes across most palpably in

programs that are also works of genre, from the police procedural (in
the case of True Detective or The Killing), fantasy (Game of Thrones), to
horror (The Walking Dead). In fact, it’s probably no coincidence that
genre series are the most committed to this sort of sober and
high-minded tone. This new solemnity could be seen as a sign of status
anxiety: a byproduct of both serial television’s desire to disassociate
from its soapy origins, and genre programming’s striving for cultural
legitimacy. In short, these shows are victims of their own pretensions.
TV might be enjoying a Golden Age, but it appears it may also be
harboring some self-doubt.

To prove that such cheerlessness isn’t unique to American drama,

there’s the BBC series The Fall. During the second season there’s
precisely one moment that earns a laugh, and it’s when a member of the
Belfast police department—engaged in what’s supposed to be a
surreptitious search of a suspect’s house—puts his foot through the attic
floor, causing the bedroom ceiling to collapse. It’s the sole instance of
slapstick in a show that’s otherwise unwaveringly grim. Of course, its
primary concerns—sexual violence, psychopathy, Irish sectarian
tensions—don’t exactly lend themselves to lighthearted treatment. But
there’s a difference between tackling bleak topics, and making a virtue,
if not a fetish, of bleakness.

TV may be enjoying a Golden

Age, but it appears it may also be

3 of 9 10/07/2015 1:50 pm
Why Prestige Dramas Like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘True Dete... http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/tru...

harboring some self-doubt.

It’s a tendency that hasn’t gone unnoticed by critics. The New Yorker’s
Emily Nussbaum, for instance, argued that one of True Detective’s
principal transgressions was that it remained “dead serious” about even
the most “softheaded” of its own premises. “Which might be O.K. if
True Detective were dumb fun,” she notes, “but good God, it’s not: It’s
got so much gravitas it could run for President.” Similarly, in his review
of the most recent season of The Killing, Matt Zoller Seitz lamented that
the series remained “full of itself, occasional moments of levity
notwithstanding,” and was ultimately undone by its “gravely solemn,
we-are-reinventing-the-genre swagger that doesn’t sync up with the
stereotype-driven, sub-Special Victims Unit procedural you are actually
watching ... ”

But lately, such solemnity feels less like the exception than the rule.

Call it serial pretension—a product of genre television’s still-uncertain

sense of its own value. On the one hand, it seems quaint to suggest that
programs in the postmodern era should be entangled with questions of
taste, or that audiences might be embarrassed by their appetite for
genre entertainment, or what the film critic Pauline Kael famously
hailed as “trash.” But even the most masterly examples of serial drama
aren’t immune to such worries. As the film scholar Linda Williams
notes in her study of The Wire, its creator David Simon made a habit of
comparing his series “up”—likening it to Sophoclean tragedy, for
instance—while its fans have frequently analogized it to Dickens, as if
to prevent its being designated as “mere” television. Equally revealing
is Daniel Mendelsohn’s defense of Game of Thrones, which hinged on
the show’s exceptionally “literary” qualities—the explanation, he
suggests, for it having “seduced so many of his [writer] friends, people

4 of 9 10/07/2015 1:50 pm
Why Prestige Dramas Like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘True Dete... http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/tru...

who have either no taste for fantasy or no interest in television.”

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

This sense of hierarchy when it comes to culture is evident not only in

the regular invocations of literature in discussions about television, but
also in the broader deprecation of comedy. As The New Yorker’s Richard
Brody put it bluntly, in a larger discussion of Hollywood cinema and
award-season trends, “comedy gets no respect.” The situation may be
somewhat different in television, where series like Veep, Silicon Valley,

5 of 9 10/07/2015 1:50 pm
Why Prestige Dramas Like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘True Dete... http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/tru...

and Girls receive regular accolades, but even the most admired
comedies don’t tend to attract the kind of genuflecting reserved for
drama. And no genre remains more routinely and unselfconsciously
maligned than melodrama. Anecdotal evidence suggests that few
people admit to an enjoyment of prime-time soaps like Nashville,
Empire, or Revenge without qualifying their predilection as “guilty,” or
bracketing off the show as “trash.”

The extent to which TV drama has internalized this value system is

reflected not only in its bias toward dark and punishingly tragic content,
but in its narrative tendencies, as well—particularly its emphasis on
what the television scholar Jason Mittell calls “narrative complexity.”
For Mittell, a hallmark of complex TV is that it prioritizes plot events
over character relations, in contrast to the relationship-driven soap
opera. It’s a description that readily applies to shows like The Walking
Dead or Game of Thrones, which don’t just give precedence to plot
(leading one critic to dub GoT the “plottiest show on television”), but
which do so at the expense of characters, who are casually and often
gruesomely dispatched. It’s true these two shows, in particular, take
their cues from literary (or graphic literary) sources. Regardless, their
veneration for plot suggests they’ve seized on complexity as the surest
path to prestige.

The very structure of Game of Thrones seems to telegraph its ambitions.

Take “The Wall”: a 700-foot-tall barrier of solid ice that separates the
north of Westeros from the dangers beyond. On the far side, we’re in
the realm of pure pulp: a world of unchecked blood-letting, incestuous
coupling, and White-Walking. Not so different from what takes place
within the Wall, only there’s far less concern that the unfolding events
must mean something. Back in the Seven Kingdoms, however, the
target mode is historical realism. Here, the set pieces are epic; the
moral stakes high; and the dialogue portentous, so that even passing

6 of 9 10/07/2015 1:50 pm
Why Prestige Dramas Like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘True Dete... http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/tru...

exchanges are made to seem positively refulgent with meaning. Here,

characters are given to announcing a scene’s thematic significance: The
scheming counselor Varys can proclaim, in the season five premiere,
“We’re talking about the future of our country!” Or Daenerys
Targaryen, the aspiring queen and current warlord, can remind
viewers—in a Days of our Lives-worthy piece of exposition,—“I did not
take up residence in this pyramid so I could watch the city below decline
into chaos!”

In this light, while early reviews of Game of Thrones often focused on

rescuing it from the genre label—“boy fiction,” as Ginia Bellafonte
termed it in The New York Times—one issue with the show is that it isn’t
genre enough. If, as Nussbaum has observed, “fantasy—like television
itself, really—has long been burdened with audience condescension,”
the solution is not to tamp down (or wall off) the fantasy. In contrast to
proud genre series like The Americans, Justified, or Orphan Black—which
concern themselves with the subjects of spy-craft, gun thuggery, and
clone warfare, respectively—Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and
True Detective seem almost self-loathing, and for all their nudity and
gore, ashamed to indulge their B-movie impulses. That’s not to say
there are no funny moments; as Lord Tyrion on GoT, Peter Dinklage
has performed heroic feats of comic relief. But on balance, these
programs qualify as punitive pulp: a subcategory of shows that exploit
viewers’ love of swordplay, zombies, and serial killers while denying
them the lurid pleasures therein.

So who’s to blame for this grim state of affairs? It’s tough to say. Not
only because the collaborative nature of the medium makes it hard to
determine who’s “responsible” for a program’s tone, but because tone
itself is so slippery, a product of viewers’ perceptions as well as
showrunners’ intentions. At the same time, it seems significant, as
Mittell mentioned to me, that three of the above-mentioned series were

7 of 9 10/07/2015 1:50 pm
Why Prestige Dramas Like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘True Dete... http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/tru...

created and/or written by those with little previous experience in TV,

and far more in the worlds of fiction (Nic Pizzolatto), film (Frank
Darabont), or both (David Benioff). It’s not farfetched to think that they
might be bringing to one medium the norms and practices of another.

These programs qualify as

punitive pulp, exploiting viewers’
love of swordplay, zombies, and
serial killers, while denying them
the lurid pleasures therein.

It’s a factor that could help explain the difference between these shows
and the many dramas that don’t suffer from such pomposity of spirit,
including canonical series like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or The
Wire—which as Jacob Weisberg noted in Slate, “attains the dimensions
of tragedy without being depressing.” It’s true that some of the shows I
mention occasionally manage a similar feat. True Detective’s pilot, for
instance, has lots of fun deflating Rust’s addlepated philosophizing;
when he tells his partner that a dead body is a “a paraphilic love map,”
or mentions that he can “smell the psychosphere,” Marty’s reaction is
to tell him to “stop saying odd shit like that.” But it’s a spirit of
amusement that dissipates as the show progresses, overwhelmed by the
increasingly baroque mythos, Southern-baked stereotypes, and heavy
confessional talk.

The problem, then, is not that these shows are serious, or even that
they’re almost always serious. It’s that they expect the audience to be,
too. In other words, the major flaw of True Detective or Game of Thrones

8 of 9 10/07/2015 1:50 pm
Why Prestige Dramas Like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘True Dete... http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/tru...

is their monotone, the fact that they only ever ask for or permit from
viewers a single, worshipful stance. It’s this allergy to camp—to deviant
interpretations—that likely makes these shows so ripe for deflation.
Both SNL and Key & Peele recently featured sketches spoofing the body
count on Game of Thrones, while one of the liveliest debates about The
Killing’s fourth season concerned Detective Linden’s chapped lips.
Similarly, it can be hard to watch True Detective without recalling A.O.
Scott’s comments about August, Osage County that its performers
should win an award for “most acting.”

That said, in recent years there’s been an encouraging counter-trend:

the embrace of a hybrid tone that, if hardly unique to contemporary
television, may be emerging as a distinctive characteristic of
post-network-era programming. In her roundup of the best 2014 TV,
for instance, Nussbaum remarked in passing that the “distinction
between comedy and drama” had dissolved. It could be premature to
declare this erosion complete, given the entrenchment of so many
current series on the dark, dreary side of the tonal spectrum. But it’s a
worthy goal. If excellent tragicomedies like Enlightened, Getting On,
Louie, and Transparent are any indication, new programs may
increasingly aspire to move among tonal registers, rather than insist on
wholeheartedly embracing one.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ELIZABETH ALSOP is an assistant professor of English and Film Studies at

Western Kentucky University. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times
Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Bookforum.

9 of 9 10/07/2015 1:50 pm