After just three episodes, Game of Thrones is already on its way to becoming the kind of TV show that produces a messianic fervor among viewers.
Fans are so into HBO’s new knight’s tale that they’re getting into physical altercations and taking to online comment sections to decry the deaths of minor characters. Some are even signing up for premium cable just to follow the action.
“I had considered simply watching torrents of the episodes and waiting to buy the DVDs, but I knew the show would be costly and that fan support would be needed to keep it on the air,” said Mark Kennison in an e-mail to Wired.com. A 26-year-old Game of Thrones fan from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Kennison said he signed up for HBO right before the first episode aired.
A devilish mix of Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy with good old sex and violence is fueling the fervor. The show appeals to fans of the George R.R. Martin books upon which it’s based as well as to Joe Sixpack types who like gritty HBO dramas. And the audience is growing: After the show’s second episode held onto the 2.2 million viewers who tuned in to the pilot — already an impressive feat — Game of Thrones‘ viewership for last Sunday’s episode increased to 2.4 million.
Despite the admissions of people like Kennison, it’s hard to tell if the launch of Game of Thrones has actually led to a spike in the network’s subscriber numbers. HBO reps told Wired.com they have no way of tracking whether subscribers sign up because of any particular program. However, the network renewed the show for a second season after only one episode, and Game of Thrones has been getting a fair amount of critical praise.
So what’s the secret sauce that makes Game of Thrones so popular? It’s impossible to say exactly, but, as Rob Sheffield recently pointed out in Rolling Stone, all the drama and nakedness give the show an appeal that reaches beyond fantasy geeks.
That’s no accident. Show co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss said they used previous HBO shows like The Wire and Deadwood as touchstones. Both programs took genre programming — cop shows, Westerns — and reinvented them, much as Benioff and Weiss have done with the fantasy genre.
‘The characters in George’s novels curse each other, they fuck each other, and when they fight, they bleed.’ “Game of Thrones is fantasy (high fantasy, to be specific), but the magical elements exist on the periphery of the story, not front and center. No unicorns. No wizards in pointy hats,” Benioff and Weiss said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “One of the reasons the books appealed to us was because this was fantasy for adults — the characters in George’s novels curse each other, they fuck each other, and when they fight, they bleed. We never wanted to bowdlerize that.”
That gritty sense of reality from Martin’s popular multibook series A Song of Ice and Fire has brought viewers to the show. Kennison notes that the well-drawn characters in the books are what kept him reading and what made him want to tune in to the show.
The show could also lead TV watchers to the books. Eric, founder of a Game of Thronesfan site who asked that his last name be withheld, said in an e-mail to Wired.com that he got into Martin’s books after reading about the series. Now he’s a fan of both.
“I don’t watch a lot of TV and rarely commit to watching more than one series at a time,” he said, noting that he subscribed to HBO just for the series. “[Reading about Game of Thrones] piqued my interest and I went and bought the first book, which I really enjoyed. I also decided to follow the news about the show’s development and started the fan site.”
That’s a lot of devotion for a show that had yet to air a single episode.
However, not every fan of the books will be satisfied by the HBO adaptation. Wired.com’s Dylan Tweney noted in his review that even though he found the show “amazing,” it wasn’t as immersive as reading the books.
Such are the ways of geekdom.
But so long as Game of Thrones keeps getting nerds and non-nerds to tune in, fans should have something to celebrate and bicker over for at least a few more seasons to come.
Game of Thrones airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.
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