Game of Thrones Worth Playing

My relationship with television mirrors the one I have with people. There are the shows I love, and they can be on 24/7...and then there are the shows I can't stand, which is most of them, and they ARE on 24/7.

I should know. Television is the background noise of my domestic life. With a few exceptions, I strive mightily to keep it there. But I know, for instance, that the episode of Golden Girls that is on as I am falling asleep each weeknight is the same one that greets me the next weekday morning. I know that if you search hard enough, you'll discover that one of Family Guy, Friends, or Two and a Half Men is ALWAYS showing somewhere on the dial. (I tolerate the latter two shows and unabashedly love the former; I think Seth MacFarlane and his writers have a direct pipeline into my sense of humour.)

Most of the rest of what's on TV, past or present, can go hang. I don't even hate the commercials, the way most of you do: in fact, there are usually four or five every year I could watch on a loop.

Though, come to think of it, if I ran the TV world I'd make a few changes to advertising:

• You get ONE HUNDRED SHOWINGS of your spot and that's it, everybody out of the pool, make a new commercial.
• None of this "let's show the same commercial back-to-back, or twice in the same break" crap. Your ad can only be shown once in any hour long period on any given network.
• NO FEMININE HYGIENE PRODUCT ADS. Not necessary. That's what mothers are for. And besides, I could be eating fish soup. Yech.
• We're all consenting adults here (after a certain hour, anyway): let's see some ads reflect that fact. Just once I'd like to see a Pepsi ad wherein a guy gulps a Coke Zero, sputters, and says "what IS this shit?!"

So that's advertising. Moving on to the shows: let's see. Most of them are, how do we put this? Oh, yeah...asinine.

That's a sweeping generalization, to be sure, so hand me the dustpan as I mop up all of so-called "reality" television, most of what passes for comedy, and every drama CBC has ever produced. Another pass for "news", which is distressingly marketed as entertainment. Most of what appears on news programs shouldn't, and most of what doesn't should.

Asinine. I know, I know, there are plenty of people out there who feel that's a perfect description of Family Guy. What can I say, except this: on the surface, it seems to revel in its asininity...look at it a little deeper and it's one of the smartest shows on television. The more you know about pop culture, the funnier that show is.

I haven't bothered following a drama since Joan of Arcadia was cancelled. I have both seasons on DVD. Haven't watched any of it, though, and I'm not sure why. Possibly because even one episode will bring all the anger at the cancellation back up from where it's laying largely dormant. That was a good show, damnit. Profoundly spiritual without ever once getting preachy, it had crisp writing and characters you cared about.

I found out back in February that George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels were going to be adapted to the small screen, and I danced a jig. Now you have to understand that I mislike fantasy novels almost as much as I mislike television; people had been telling me to read A Game of Thrones for years, and I kept putting it off. Then one day I caved in, started reading, and was quickly enthralled.

A Game Of Thrones is not your average hobbity fantasy novel. The characters are almost all human, and believably so. Few if any of them are wholly good or wholly evil; everybody's just trying to survive the best they can. The world they're trying to survive in many ways mirrors ours circa 1400 or so. Lives tend to be nasty, brutish, and short. And unpredictable: Martin absolutely revels in turning fantasy tropes on their ear. The Dauntless Hero in most fantasies you can identify by page ten, and you know he's going to go adventuring, have a million arrows shot at him (only one will hit, giving him a flesh would that serves to accentuate his Dauntless Hero physique) and eventually rescue the damsel in distress and ride off into the sunset. In a Martin fantasy, the Dauntless Hero is like to be beheaded nine or ten chapters in. Or he'll brave the million arrows and find his damsel is dead. Or an ugly crone. Or a dead, ugly crone who turns out to be his mother. You get the idea.

Magic exists in Martin's world, but for the most part it's shadowy and muted, exactly the way you'd expect to stumble across it in ours, if you ever did. The people move through this world, trying to screw each other or screw each other over, and the outcome of each screwing/screwing over is utterly unpredictable. Kind of like life.

I am excited and gratified to report that the television show is a smashing success, nearly equal to and in some places better than the source material, and that's saying something. Most every character is exactly the way I pictured him or her. They're following the novel pretty much as closely as they can, which means a great many non-reader viewers were outraged last week to find they had killed off one of the main characters in the penultimate episode of the first season. There's another one set to go tomorrow night. Has that EVER happened on television?

Because this show airs on HBO, they're free to mimic human life in all its baseness and glory, which means people swear, have sex, and hurt each other, sometimes all at once. With that caveat in mind, pick up season one on DVD when it comes out. I promise you won't regret it.