Game of Thrones ended back in 2019. HBO is now two seasons deep into the spinoff House of the Dragon. Shows like The Wheel of Time, The Rings of Power, The Witcher, Foundation, and more are all competing to see which can go the biggest and be the most epic. Budgets are rising, sometimes to the point where major set pieces are being cut and we have to wait years between new seasons.
Is this sustainable? Is the bubble about to pop, and is there a way out? We talk about it on this week's episode of Take the Black, our weekly chat show devoted to all things sci-fi, fantasy, movies, TV and books. Perhaps the thing to keep the bubble at bay will be A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, an upcoming Game of Thrones prequel that will be much smaller in scale than anything that's come before it. But in scaling things down and making a show that's more about character than it is about a continent-spanning war, HBO may have found a way to reenergize the fantasy revolution it started with Game of Thrones.
Or at least that's the sense we're getting based on what we've seen of the show so far. We get into it in detail below. Watch!
Beyond Westeros, we talk about The Penguin, which is impressing everybody over on HBO. Who would have thought that a Batman spinoff about the Caped Crusader's third or fourth most notorious villain would end up in the running for best show of the year? We also talk about some of the things we're watching and reading (or looking forward to watching and reading) before launching into the WiC News Lightning Round, where we blast through all the stories we couldn't get through in the main body of the show.
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