News Reporter: Act Four: How to tell whether you should watch ‘Game of Thrones’

Wednesday, 19 July 2017

Act Four: How to tell whether you should watch ‘Game of Thrones’

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen in the seventh season of "Game of Thrones." (Macall B. Polay/Courtesy of HBO)

Every week, I answer a question from Monday’s Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the July 17 chat here and submit questions for the July 24 chat here. This week, a reader wants to know whether to catch up with a very popular television show.

“Game of Thrones”: Never seen it. Should I? Seriously!

The first and best reason to watch “Game of Thrones” is if you want to. Actually, that’s the first and best reason to consume any work of art or culture. There are plenty of valid reasons that you might not want to watch a series like “Game of Thrones”: You’re not interested in quasi-medieval settings, or fantasy works; you have trouble watching graphic violence, specifically sexual violence, on screen; you prefer your heroes to be admirable rather than ambiguous. All of these are reasons readers have told me that they don’t want to watch “Game of Thrones,” and they’re all legitimate. There is no reason to push yourself through something that will make you extraordinarily upset, especially if you don’t have a strong desire to watch it in the first place. (I should note there is a difference between avoiding work that will challenge you and work that makes you distraught or viscerally nauseated.)

The next best reason is because you want to know what everyone else is talking about. Cultural literacy is a valuable thing, even if it’s harder to achieve in an increasingly fragmented media environment. I don’t necessarily think “Game of Thrones” is a terrific fit for all of the contemporary political scenarios to which it’s being applied, or even that it means the things that the people who invoke it want it to mean. But it is increasingly the source of shared references, and watching it will unlock a shared language for you.

And though I don’t want to be anyone’s guru, I guess I would tell you that I like “Game of Thrones” very much, and, absent the stipulations listed above, I think you might, too. The series makes me laugh incredibly hard, even when it’s grossing me out, and it has made me cry. It has introduced me to a huge roster of actors I hadn’t known before, who have breathed wonderful life into characters I loved when they only lived on the page. The costume design is fabulous, and the show just looks great in general; if you like to travel, it will give you a whole raft of potential destinations. And if you’re engaged with the so-called Golden Age of television, it will probably deepen your thinking about a bunch of the tropes of the genre; “Game of Thrones” will suck you deep into its world and make you think harder about our own.

All of this said, if you don’t want to watch “Game of Thrones” but also don’t want to admit that you don’t watch it, there might be a little something further down in this newsletter that will help.

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