Have any of these 15 shows become “the next Game of Thrones”?
By WiC Staff
7. His Dark Materials
His Dark Materials is an HBO show adapted from a beloved fantasy series that debuted around half a year after Game of Thrones ended. It was almost like GoT was passing on the baton…
That said, His Dark Materials has always been a little too small and strange to properly take the place of Game of Thrones in the minds of the masses. It’s nominally about Lyra Belacqua, a precocious orphan who sets out on a quest alongside her dæmon (basically her soul externalized as a shape-shifting familiar) to rescue her friend, who’s been kidnapped by a mysterious organization working for the tyrannical church that runs Lyra’s world.
And it just gets weirder from there; we’ve got talking polar bears, alternate dimensions, actual angels and much more. His Dark Materials sometimes feels a bit more like The Chronicles of Narnia than A Song of Ice and Fire, seeing as it follows a couple of kids stumbling into weird and wonderful new worlds. But you can feel the Game of Thrones influence on the show specifically, which sprawls out a bit as it tries to deepen characters only sketched on the page to achieve more of an ensemble feel.
As a fan of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, I think the HBO adaptation has been a little hit and miss, but there’s enough good there to make it worth a watch, even if it’s not gonna take the place of Game of Thrones. Its upcoming third and final season promises to be the best yet. – Dan
8. Westworld
The further down the list we get, the further away from Game of Thrones we go. Westworld may be a lavish genre show on HBO, but its focus and style are very different.
First off, there are the milieus, with Game of Thrones taking place in a fantasy world based on medieval England and Westworld a future where it can be hard to tell advanced androids apart from actual human beings. Both shows tell complicated stories, but on GoT, the complexity comes from the sheer number of characters and moving parts — the story itself is relatively straightforward. On Westworld, the writers like to grapple with heady sci-fi concepts involving consciousness and free will. And they often present these ideas in circuitous form, with lots of flashbacks, flash-forwards, parallel timelines, and more.
Westworld can go a bit far with this technique, to the point where the more recent seasons have confused rather than fascinated viewers. The show’s first season inspired a ton of buzz, but it’s dropped off somewhat since then. Game of Thrones, meanwhile, just got bigger every year.
At this point, we can safely say that Westworld isn’t going to replace Game of Thrones, but it deserves recognition for following in that show’s footsteps with its ambition, its production budget, and its adventurous spirit. – Dan