GoT bored

While first 8 episodes of season six were glacial, the following couple of them just went berserk

Last month the world had a new dichotomy to reckon with: those who watched the Season Six finale of Game of Thrones and those who didn't. One tweet said, "If the Red Wedding was kindergarten, this is college." As funny as it might be, it's anything but the truth.

This was one of the weakest finales of this otherwise decent HBO series about middle-earth kingdoms. After Breaking Bad, this is the series that got a Kevlar-like grip on the collective consciousness of a whole generation. This season has been a case of diminishing returns though. Mainly because it's unpublished material and the studio writers decided to tie every story up in a nice little knot.

I read the hot takes on the internet gushing about how this season is superbly feminist and that men have been rendered into secondary characters. As much as I admire that sense of purpose, which looks more inadvertent than deliberate, barring Episode Nine, where an amazing fight sequence between Ramsay Bolton and Jon Snow was mounted, the rest of the episodes have been grindingly dull.

Once Snow was brought back to life, anything utterly preposterous looks possible in the series now. This was the series that started off six years ago with a first season that ends with the death of a character (Ned Stark) whose name keeps resonating year after year. George R R Martin has been spinning a gripping yarn, but it has been threadbare lately.

For all the glacial pace that the current season had to offer during the first eight episodes, the following couple of them just went berserk. I was looking forward to a fabulous exchange between High Sparrow and Cersei and it all fizzles out with a bang that is more of a whimper for the viewer. Khaleesi's conflicts have been so caricaturish that it looked something straight out of a Game of Thrones fan fiction series. Even Bolton's death has been capital-A anti-climactic. For all the diabolical things he lobbed at people, a gory death without the visuals feels lazy, especially for a series that holds nothing back.

When the Hodor back story kicked in, that was the moment when I started hate watching the show: am loathing it but I wanted to be in the know as well (aka FoMO). There was a time when the series was ebullient, sure-footed like a ballerina from Bolshoi Ballet but now it's just groaning under the weight of the expectations of viewers who want to be blown away all the time by Michael Bay-level theatrics.

It seems a common affliction among all American series that they get ridiculously derailed when they venture beyond three seasons. Breaking Bad, Homeland, Mad Men and a bunch of other lionised shows have all suffered. Only Girls, The Wire and, to some extent, Scandal withstood this trend. Silicon Valley gets uneven enough for me to wait it out one more season to see where it goes.

Not everything is wrong with American television scene though: Transparent, Broad City and You're The Worst show exactly why the experts say "TV is the new novel". But my patience is wearing thin now, especially when foreign TV series are far more brilliant, engaging and cerebral. They never pander to the viewer demographics and have a solid plot coupled with breathtaking atmosphere, a rarity in America where focus groups rule the roost. Bunheads, Enlightened, Looking and Togetherness are all examples of amazing television series that have been sacrificed at the altar of the focus groups and witless studio panjandrums.

The Italian TV series Gomorrah is what I would call is an alternative Game of Thrones. Roberto Saviano wrote a determinedly hardball series about the drug mafia lords and their conflicts in the southern Italian city of Naples. The principal characters keep dying here too but they seem organic, unlike Game of Thrones where most deaths lately felt like audience's basest instincts are being indulged.

The series is well set up for the next season when Cersei and Khaleesi are going to lock horns with the latter having able assistance from Snow. But if Season Six is anything to go by, we should approach its follow up with the same excitement that we reserve for a wet towel. The erotic is now pornographic after all.

jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in