Is Game of Thrones responsible for the rise of fantasy on Television

[CmdrShep2183]

I have been noticing there is more fantasy on TV now. Is Game of Thrones responsible for this? This is not a bad thing. CGI action adventures sure beat the hell out of reality TV and sitcom.
https://tribzap2it.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/once-upon-a-time-season-4-poster-full.jpg
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/grimm/images/e/ed/Season1-DVD.png/revision/latest?cb=20120716184827
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[Yora]

I assume so. The Lord of the Rings movies brought fantasy to the attention of filmmakers again, but I think Game of Thrones was responsible for raising the possibility to try it on TV.

[random11]

I'm not sure since most of the fantasy shows are urban fantasy stories.

There are a lot of "remakes" of comic books and graphic novels though, so I'm guessing there is more connection to the success of superhero movies, especially the marvel cinematic universe.

[Yora]

Urban fantasy is much cheaper to film. :smallamused:

[Rodin]

Our friendly neighborhood chatbot strikes again. :smallamused:

[random11]

Urban fantasy is much cheaper to film. :smallamused:

I don't think it's cheaper to film, after all half of "Once upon a time" is flashbacks from fantasy setting, and it's basically a forest or castle set. No one really expects these shows to have LoTR combat sequences.

I do however, think it's cheaper to write. most urban fantasy shows are "let's take a known show, replace one word with something magical and we have plot for a season without effort".

I think most episodes of Grimm is a combination of games:
Take a random episode of a cop show to determine the basic plot idea.
Throw darts at a board with animal names to determine the monster of the week.
Sneeze in German accent to determine the name of said creature.

[Murk]

I'd say the rise of fantasy on television is responsible for Game of Thrones, instead of the other way around.

This is all about polls and marketing research and user questionnaires and stuff. Just like fashion, I feel television shows are more of a "Supply makes demand" thing than a "demand and supply" situation.

[Yora]

What other succesful fantasy shows have been there before 2011?

[Zalabim]

What other succesful fantasy shows have been there before 2011?


With its eleventh season, Supernatural became the longest-running North American fantasy series.[11] The series has been renewed for a twelfth season,[12] which premiered on October 13, 2016.[13] I don't know.

Also, there is a list. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fantasy_television_programs#United_States) I'll leave it up to more interested parties to put that into successful and pre-2011.

[Kato]

Our friendly neighborhood chatbot strikes again. :smallamused:
Well, as long as he is not trying to sell us anything...



I don't know.

Also, there is a list. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fantasy_television_programs#United_States) I'll leave it up to more interested parties to put that into successful and pre-2011.
Supernatural? Never heard of it :smalltongue: Now get in the damn Impala.

While SPN was and remains to be quite popular I wouldn't put it quite in the same category as GoT. That said, I also wouldn't give GoT credit for many recent shows. OUaT started around the same time and is just vastly different in so many aspects it's hard to compare the two. Also, there have always* been successful fantasy shows and while I'm not that deep into US television I don't feel like the number or success has widely increased, apart from GoT's.
Things like Buffy, Supernatural or Vampie Diaries (whose existence is most certainly due to another series of books, not ASOIAF) cater to a very different audience than what is GoT's core, I think. (Of course there is overlap but still)

GoT if anything might have made historic ficton popular again but not fantasy, I think.

[An Enemy Spy]

I think Game of Thrones is responsible for the rise of medieval historic fiction shows like Vikings, The Last Kingdom, Marco Polo and so on. It just doesn't have much overlap with the urban fantasy genre.

[Aedilred]

Short answer: yes and no, assuming we buy into the premise that fantasy is on the rise at all.

Longer answer: The Lord of the Rings films were the real breakthrough for fantasy in visual media because they were good enough in their own right that they achieved a level of mainstream success that had eluded most of their predecessors. To a lesser extent, Harry Potter, too - the main reason I don't credit that to the same level being simply that children's films have always erred on the side of fantasy (see: much of Disney's output) and the early HP films were very much children's films in that respect; after that they were dealing with established audiences and trading on the brand.

So I think that was the real turning-point in terms of people accepting that fantasy could be good, and could garner mainstream appeal. There had obviously been many fantasy films and TV ventures prior to The Lord of the Rings, but they had tended to be niche, campy or just downright bad (obvious examples being Xena and Hercules in the 90s, films like Conan and Willow in the 80s and, a mere year before LotR itself, Dungeons and Dragons). In any case, I think it's fair to say that without The Lord of the Rings, we'd never have got Game of Thrones.

The easy thing to do would be to say that Game of Thrones was the vehicle which made the jump from cinema where fantasy had flourished - albeit without many truly great outings - to television, and that is true to an extent. But looking outside the genre ghetto for a minute I think Game of Thrones was a relative latecomer to the cause of strong narrative television. Now, to be fair, the potential of television for book adaptations was a secret pretty much always known to UK television-watchers, who have long feasted on excellent televisual versions of works like Brideshead Revisited, Tinker Tailor, Narnia, Pride and Prejudice and so on (all of which were, incidentally, remade in what were in almost all cases inferior film versions) - but budget has always been a concern for TV in this part of the world. American television meanwhile had its revolution with The West Wing, The Sopranos, Twin Peaks and their ilk, when the narrative potential of television combined with American televisual budgets really started to be exploited properly, and it developed as an actual storytelling art form. Then you had the second-generation shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad and Mad Men, all of which provided fairly fertile ground for the development of Game of Thrones.

One of the most obvious forebears of Game of Thrones was, to my mind, Rome, which wasn't fantasy but was television with the same sort of scope that Game of Thrones later had, and was eventually shelved for reasons of expense. Lost is also worthy of attention for its intrigue-laden, ensemble-cast nature and for blurring the lines between conventional drama and sci-fi/fantasy pretty heavily. There was also Carnivale, in the same sort of space, which never quite hit its stride, and of course while it's not strictly in the same genre, Buffy casts a long shadow.

So it's fair to say I think that Game of Thrones was the first time in modern television where a fantasy show has really made its mark. But I think when viewed in its industrial context it starts to look less like a breakout hit and more something which was walking a well-trodden path, and had been coming for a while: I get the feeling that if Game of Thrones hadn't come along, something not entirely dissimilar would have done within a year or two, and there are other shows with the same kind of appeal which were arguably unfortunate not to capture the attention that it went on to before its arrival. To what extent the presence of Sean Bean in the marketing helped is obviously debatable: I think it can't be underestimated.

The other thing I'd speculate on is to what extent it really has established fantasy as a credible televisual genre, rather than being treated as an ongoing exception. I haven't noticed a rush of high-quality, popular, fantasy TV shows in the wake of Game of Thrones; rather, it looks much like business as usual. And the point raised as a distinction between what for the sake of argument I'll call urban fantasy and high fantasy is a good one: urban fantasy (in which I'd include Buffy) has a long heritage on television and has never attracted the same stigma, whereas full epic otherworld fantasy is still pretty thin on the ground despite having a potent standardbearer.

[DuctTapeKatar]

I like Game of Thrones and all, but when I look at it from how it changes the fantasy genre as a whole, I can't help but shudder. Whenever live-action television is mentioned, my brain immediately jumps to the cruddy crime/drama series that are basically built on assembly lines, written by people unsuited for the tasks, and are just don't understand the genre they are writing for.

Basically, I'm afraid that Game of Thrones might have opened the floodgate for a million inconsequential shows that will try to reach the fantasy audience and, like most cop shows nowadays, cannot be taken the slightest bit seriously because they are building off of what they think what Game of Thrones popular ("Oh man, I'm going to kill ten times more people than George R.R. Martin! Because killing people always means a more mature story!"). Imagine something akin to Game of Thrones but watered down- there isn't anyone behind the scenes basing it off of a good book or comic, but someone writing it because they were hired to write a drama/fantasy show rather than writing a good story because they have a passion for it or that they like the medium.

Example: Marco Polo on Netflix. I stopped watching shortly after a few episodes because it felt like it was trying to out-do Game of Thrones ("We can throw even more naked chicks on screen than GoT- take that!"). I felt like nothing amounted to anything in the politics of the world it was trying to make and the main characters felt like extras, being nothing but exposition and bland dialogue.

[Kitten Champion]

I think Game of Thrones is responsible for the rise of medieval historic fiction shows like Vikings, The Last Kingdom, Marco Polo and so on. It just doesn't have much overlap with the urban fantasy genre.

Yeah. Chat-bot aside, Grimm came out of the guy who worked on Angel with Whedon, Once Upon a Time came from the Lost people. Which speaks to corporate television's general willingness to give opportunities to those who've created successful series in the past to create something derivative but slightly different and run with it rather than worrying about what HBO is doing.

[tomandtish]

Yeah. Chat-bot aside, Grimm came out of the guy who worked on Angel with Whedon, Once Upon a Time came from the Lost people. Which speaks to corporate television's general willingness to give opportunities to those who've created successful series in the past to create something derivative but slightly different and run with it rather than worrying about what HBO is doing.

It should also be noted that both of those shows were ordered to development by their respective networks before Game of Thrones aired their first season. OUaT started casting in 2010, and the conception of the show goes back to 2004. NBC ordered Grimm in January 2011.

Genres cycle. Late 90s and early 2000s you had a decent run of them as well.

As Enemy Spy noted, Game of Thrones probably gets credit for the run of historical fantasy/fiction we've seen in the last 3 years, esp. on cable.

Edited to correct typo on Grimm date.

[The Glyphstone]

NBC ordered Grimm in January 2016.


You mean 2010 here as well, right? Grimm is into its Season 6, it first aired back in 2011.

[ben-zayb]

I could've sworn that the flood of "Your Childhood Tale...with a Twist!" movies were the ones that paved the way for Once Upon a Time. That, or the rumored TV version of Fables (http://www.vertigocomics.com/fables) that never came into fruition.

And as already mentioned, all three examples above belong to Urban Fantasy, and I'm pretty sure we've a lot of those way before GoT. Charmed and Buffy come to mind the most. Oh, and Power Rangers

[random11]

I could've sworn that the flood of "Your Childhood Tale...with a Twist!" movies were the ones that paved the way for Once Upon a Time. That, or the rumored TV version of Fables (http://www.vertigocomics.com/fables) that never came into fruition.


I could be wrong, but I think once upon a time was initially planned to be Fables, but later it was decided to take the same core idea and go to a completely different direction, discarding the name.

[Ninja_Prawn]

The other thing I'd speculate on is to what extent it really has established fantasy as a credible televisual genre, rather than being treated as an ongoing exception. I haven't noticed a rush of high-quality, popular, fantasy TV shows in the wake of Game of Thrones; rather, it looks much like business as usual.

This is something to keep an eye on. I mean, not long after Game of Thrones took off, I was hearing suggestions that The Kingkiller Chronicle might be made into a TV series, and more recently there's been a lot of talk about a possible Wheel of Time series. Even if they don't happen, people seem much more willing to propose them now.

[tomandtish]

You mean 2010 here as well, right? Grimm is into its Season 6, it first aired back in 2011.

Yeah, typo on my part. Actually was ordered January 2011 (so concept was around before then presumably). Corrected in original post.

[Telonius]

Well, you did have Merlin starting in 2008 for the BBC/BBC America crowd. Not sure how many mutual fans there might be, but it's broadly in the same genre.

[Kato]

This is something to keep an eye on. I mean, not long after Game of Thrones took off, I was hearing suggestions that The Kingkiller Chronicle might be made into a TV series, and more recently there's been a lot of talk about a possible Wheel of Time series. Even if they don't happen, people seem much more willing to propose them now.

Yikes, please no. I mean, I like the books well enough but on the one hand they might be a bit hard to put into pictures and the casting would be impossible. You'd need a 15 or so year old amazing actor who hardly ages with time. Just... just don't try this, please.

But this reminds me... I will admit GoT might open up a new line of adapting books into series, instead of movies. Which I think is a way better idea because most movies just have to cut so much from the original material.. if there wasn't such a prejudice of movies over series, I feel we'd get much better stuff on average.

[JeenLeen]

Yikes, please no. I mean, I like the books well enough but on the one hand they might be a bit hard to put into pictures and the casting would be impossible. You'd need a 15 or so year old amazing actor who hardly ages with time. Just... just don't try this, please.


I'm reminded of how bad the Sword of Truth TV series was, or at least the first bit of it I watched before it was cancelled. I agree it would hard to do those justice, although I guess the convoluted, several-plots-active-at-once of Wheel of Time wasn't a lot worse than Game of Thrones. (No insult meant to the series.)

[Darth Ultron]

No. As Game of Thrones is both on cable and is ''Rated R'' it's a bit in a category by itself. To think that people might watch GoT and then say ''wow, lets make a show just like that but silly and rated G'' is just wrong. How can you compare ''GoT undescrible scene'' vs ''wow, we will have the actress take of her dress and all we will see is her bare shoulder..wow..that will blow everyone's minds''. It only get worse with everything like where GoT has meaningful violence and they put together shows like ''wow, the guy will toss down his sword and punch that bad guy..or..or..shoot the bad guys sword out of his hand with a sling shot...yes!''

TV does go in cycles. Once all shows were cop shows....then medical dramas...then law shows...then ''CSI'' shows...then spy shows...then, ugh, reality TV, and now Superheros.

Most networks have had a ''fantasy'' show on every year....but like most shows they don't last all that long. Going beyond the networks and TV was full of fantasy type shows.

And now in the 21st century we get ''online'' shows too.

But not because Game of Thrones.....

[Aedilred]

Well, you did have Merlin starting in 2008 for the BBC/BBC America crowd. Not sure how many mutual fans there might be, but it's broadly in the same genre.
Merlin was pretty much the direct successor to Robin Hood, I think: British mythology, episodic format, same audience, very likely the same time slot. Merlin was more obviously high fantasy but they shared more than they differed, I think. And Robin Hood was in turn filling the gap left by the Doctor Who revival between series. And Who owes a debt to Buffy and Smallville (the latter of which was also an influence on Merlin) in turn. And you could probably go back a further generation to The X-Files.

Game of Thrones is probably a cousin to that type of show, rather than a sibling: it descends in a slightly different lineage which takes a turn away from the family-friendly fare of most of the above, but earlier shows which could be considered relatives have been mentioned. It wasn't the first big-budget worldbuilding epic, either; in fact it wasn't even the first one by HBO. Rome, Carnivale and The Tudors were all flamboyantly expensive historical (or histori-fantasy in one case) epics, although it must be said that Game of Thrones has been more successful in finding its audience than any of them were.

A show I haven't seen mentioned yet is Camelot. It wasn't as good as Game of Thrones and I don't think it had quite the same budget but it was still an ambitious fantasy-epic TV show with well-known actors - and it actually began airing before Game of Thrones did (although to be fair, production began later). And there was also Spartacus kicking around, which was complete schlock but did the gratuitous nudity, graphic violence and sexposition before Game of Boobs Thrones, indeed, rather more explicitly. In any case I think it's clear that Game of Thrones didn't come out of a clear blue sky, nor was it necessarily a spectacular revolutionary punt by HBO: more than one network thought a concept like it was worth a try at about the same sort of time.