HBO kick-started the age of the great TV antihero. Tony Soprano was a mobster who ordered the deaths of several people throughout the run of the show, helping The Sopranos become a generational TV show. The siblings on Succession were constantly trying to one-up each other with escalating acts of amorality, and we couldn't stop watching. Game of Thrones gave us a bench full of fascinating scoundrels, liars and killers, from the Hound to Arya Stark to pretty much every member of the Lannister family, and we loved them all. When I think of HBO, I think of a network unafraid to plumb the darker depths of human nature, with a lot of great TV series to show for it.
The newest generation of HBO shows includes big-budget hits like House of the Dragon and The Last of Us, both of which are made in the image of Game of Thrones. And in both cases, I've noticed something weird: the edges of the lead characters have been sanded down in noticeable ways; they don't go quite as hard and dark and deep as I'd like, or as fans familiar with the source material would expect, and I think it's making the shows weaker.
We're going to get into details. Beware SPOILERS for both shows below!
Let's start with The Last of Us, which ended its second season last weekend. This season has followed Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as she explores post-apocalyptic Seattle; she's hunting a woman anmed Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who brutally killed her surrogate father Joel (Pedro Pascal) at the beginning of the season. The second season is based on Naughty Dod's video game The Last of Us Part II, where Ellie gets so consumed by revenge it starts to become hard to distinguish her from Abby, ostensibly the villain of the piece.
And that's more or less the arc she goes on in season 2. We like Ellie, but she sinks to some frightening places. For my money, her best scene comes in the fifth episode, where she interrogates Abby's friend Nora (Tati Gabrielle) by mercilessly beating her with a pipe, her eyes dead and haunted. I was disturbed but couldn't look away. I was questioning whether Ellie had gone too far, but wanted worse than ever to see went next. It was the kind of challenging character turn HBO shows do best.
In the video game, Ellie continues down this path. There's a key scene where she confronts two more of Abby's friends, Owen and Mel. They both attack her. She shoots Owen and stabs Mel to death, not knowing Mel she was pregnant.
This scene is adapted in The Last of Us season 2 finale, with some key differences. Owen (Spencer Lord) still attacks Ellie and she still shoots him dead, but not as viciously. And rather than stabbing Mel (Ariela Barer), Ellie shoots a bullet through Owen's neck that also hits Mel, making her death something of an accident.
It's not that I demand Ellie be as violent as possible, or even as violent as she is in the game, where she's killing random goons by the truckload under the control of the player. But taking a death that is purposeful in the source material and turning it into an accident starts to feel less like stream-lining the story and more a way to absolve a central character of responsibility for their actions. The dead-eyed, merciless Ellie who beat Nora with that pipe doesn't show up in the finale. She doesn't sink as low, so her rise out of the abyss can't be as meaningful, if it ever comes.
You'd have to ask the creators of the show why exactly they tweaked Ellie's journey like this, but the end result of the changes is that she's a little gentler, her actions are less abhorrent, and frankly, she's a bit less interesting. I worry that in fear of the audience no longer liking Ellie, the producers softened her edges, forgetting that we don't watch a show like The Last of Us to like the characters, but to be compelled by them.
House of the Whimpering Dragon
Although I would have preferred The Last of Us delved deeper into Ellie's dark side, she's still basically on the same journey she is in the source material. Things are a bit different over on House of the Dragon, which makes plentiful changes from its source material, George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood. In several cases, the show changes what in the book is an instance of a character taking purposeful action and turns it into an accident. In the book, Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) kills his nephew Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) in a mid-air dragon fight. In the book, Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) is a stanch advocate for her family in the fight against Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) for the Iron Throne. On the show, she sticks by them only because she misinterprets her husband's dying words, and in the season 2 finale abandons them to work directly with Rhaenyra.
The way I see it, Fire & Blood is a story about a family that goes to war against itself. By the end of the tale, the survivors realize that they've destroyed their family, their country and their own souls, all for nothing. But thus far, House of the Dragon has taken more of a good-vs-bad approach, with Rhaenyra depicted as the correct ruler — at one point in the season 2 finale, in a vision, she's photographed bathed in heavenly light — and her rivals as irresponsible usurpers. Alicent abandons her family, even giving her handicapped son up for death, and it feels like we're supposed to see this as self-sacrificing rather than ludicrous, because she's joining the "right" side.
This framing feels didactic, shallow and out of step with the more challenging story Martin tells in his book (and based on how Martin has publicly criticized the show, I suspect he may feel the same way). As with The Last of Us, I wish the producers of House of the Dragon would spend less time trying to depict the characters as right or likable and more time making them compelling and believable. And if that means having them do things that read as selfish, tribal and self-destructive, then so be it; I feel like that would feel truer to life than the muddle we got at the end of the second season.
I also can't help but notice that most of the characters we're talking about are women. When I look at these shows, I see a sort of soft sexism at play: not the rabid incel sexism of the far right, where women are painted as cartoonish supervillains trying to put one over on men; but an infantilizing sexism which holds that women can't be seen acting badly lest people not like them; or worse, a belief that women aren't capable of being deeply avaricious, vengeful, or vicious, which basically amounts to a denial that they can be full and complete human beings.
House of the Dragon has a third season coming to HBO and HBO Max next year. A third season The Last of Us will be along sometime after that. These stories are far from over. I want them to be fearless and true, and I hope they remember that on HBO, of all places, they can be.
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