Game of Thrones and its children

In 2017, then-Amazon Studios president Roy Price outlined a shift in strategy happening at the company: the plan was to pitch character-driven period dramas like Z: The Beginning of Everything and focus more on “big shows that can make the biggest difference around the world.” And in 2017, shows didn’t get bigger than Game of Thrones.

A few years later, and we see Amazon’s strategy in full swing. It has a hit with The Boys, trading on our current superhero movie obsession, and is mounting not one but two wildly expensive high fantasy series: there’s The Wheel of Time, an adaptation of Robert Jordan’s 14-book strong fantasy series; and The Lord of the Rings, a show set on Middle-earth thousands of years before the story we know.

And Amazon is far from the only studio hopping on the high fantasy train. Netflix can’t get enough of the stuff: it scored hits with both The Witcher and Shadow and Bone, and had a miss with Cursed. Apple TV+ has See, a sweeping post-apocalyptic drama starring none other than Game of Thrones veteran Jason Momoa as a blind warrior chieftan. And we can’t forget that HBO itself is trying to cash in on the success of Game of Thrones, both directly with followups like House of the Dragon and indirectly with high fantasy series like His Dark Materials. Simply put, the success of Game of Thrones has led to the biggest explosion of fantasy TV in the history of the medium.

And I’m not just making this up; you can listen directly to the producers behind these shows to see where they’re getting their inspiration. “The world was really captivated by Game of Thrones and how that evolved as the characters followed different storylines — that’s very appealing to me as an audience member,” The Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau told Entertainment Weekly about a year back. “The new season is about introducing a larger story in the world. The stories become less isolated, yet each episode has its own flavor, and hopefully we’re bringing a lot more scope to the show.”

Game of Thrones came on the scene in 2011 and did what no show before had done: it was an expensive, sprawling, serialized high fantasy show with tons of special effects, complicated storylines, and high production values…and people loved it. It’s no coincidence that several years later we see lots of other shows following similar templates, and not just in the realm of fantasy. The new Star Wars series owe a ton to Game of Thrones. It had a direct influence on The Expanse on Amazon and Foundation on Apple TV+. Even historical shows like Netflix’s The Last Kingdom take a lot of cues from it.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that any of these series are bad or even derivative — the first Wheel of Time and Witcher stories came out before A Game of Thrones hit bookshelves way back in 1996. What I’m saying is that the TV adaptations of those books are getting  made — and getting made with a lot of money and support, no less — because Game of Thrones proved it was financially viable. Whatever they were before, all of these shows are now the children of Game of Thrones.

And that’s a good thing, because again, it’s leading a fantasy a TV renaissance the likes of which we may never see again in our lifetimes. But being a parent comes with risks, and children don’t always behave how you want them to. One of them may even bring this fantasy revolution to an end, if they fail hard enough.

You see, trends like these follow patterns. The last time we got a big fantasy revolution was after Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the early 2000s. It’s no coincidence that Hollywood followed up that enormous hit with several films set in the Chronicles of Narnia universe. They took a swing at His Dark Materials at the time, too, although it landed with a thud.

And that’s the problem: the children of a pop culture phenomenon often don’t have the get-up-and-go spirit of the parent; the inspiration that drove the original project to greatness is replaced with the cynicism of studio executives hoping to cash in on a trend, with diminishing returns. The Percy Jackson movies didn’t do nearly as well as the Harry Potter films they were trying to imitate, the Divergent series fizzled and flopped in the shadow of The Hunger Games franchise. First comes success, then comes greed, then comes failure.

Of course, there’s always the chance that one of the children could succeed beyond everyone’s expectations and start the trend up all over again. The post-LOTR fantasy trend was dying out by the time Game of Thrones came along in 2011, but that show was just the shot in the arm the genre needed. It did things its predecessors didn’t or couldn’t — it told a long story over the course of several seasons, it had blood and sex and swearing, it had complex characters that challenged the audience — and inspired a new wave of imitators.

So could any of the new crop of fantasy shows push the genre forward? Although we haven’t seen what they all have to offer, nothing looks like a huge leap into the future, except perhaps in terms of production values (Amazon paid hundreds of millions of dollars just for the rights to make its Lord of the Rings show). The Witcher has the down-and-dirty grit of Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials the stately coat of polish, but neither has taken the world by storm. The Wheel of Time seems to have the best chance of giving us something new, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

In the end, the fantasy show I’m most excited for is probably House of the Dragon, which promises the most continuity with the series that started this party. That may be boring of me, but the reason there’s a fantasy explosion in the first place is because people hadn’t gotten their fill of Game of Thrones when it ended, so why not give them more of what they want? I just hope there’s enough novelty in there to make this second go-round as thrilling as the first, and maybe to get that wheel turning anew.