Game of Thrones: Season 1 (2011)

It was only a matter of time before nu-television fixed its attention on a novel or novel saga so serial and sprawling that it hadn’t been completed yet. Based on George R.R. Martin’s unfinished fantasy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones fits that niche perfectly, so perfectly that it’s often like witnessing a standoff between novel and television for a new kind of serial and spectacular primacy, a battlefield between two competing modes of artistic production, both of which are already fairly antiquated and desperate in themselves. That gives Martin’s peculiar brand of historical fantasy an extraordinarily propulsive kick, a taste for power struggles that makes the very future of the franchise feel at stake whenever any of its characters clash or collide. Watching it, you can’t help but feel that the most natural thing would be for Martin to finish his story cycle as a teleplay rather than a novel, not just because he started out as a screenwriter, but because the series doesn’t adapt his novels so much as conquer them, absorbing and displacing their vast purview with all the ennobled entitlement of a new monarchy. Brief plot descriptions don’t do justice to such a multifaceted, contested narrative architecture, more ambitious in terms of sheer logistics than pretty much anything else produced in the last decade. Suffice to say that it all revolves around the fictional realm of Westeros and the power struggles between its various kingdoms and principalities. Of course, it’s all couched in fantasy, but the fantasy often seems less about escaping than emphasising just how fantastic our own world has become on the eve of all the flexible, transnational brutalities that have sustained or at least supported Westeros since its devolution from a single nation-state into the collection of conglomerates and corporate oligarchies we’re presented with here. And against that backdrop the series is brutal indeed, an anatomy of atrocity that gets more ingenious and inventive as it proceeds, filling out the exploitative fringes of the cable empire so sleekly and seductively that it’s almost a crossover between prime-time and late-night timeslots, destined to reach the most unlikely devotees, determined to redefine highbrow as HBO.