• 1 Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, The Essential HBO Reader, Lexington, University of Kentucky (...)

1It has become commonplace to proclaim that we live in a new Golden Age of television drama. Since the late 1990s, we have experienced a veritable deluge of serialized television narrative that is routinely compared (and often favorably) to the literary masterworks of Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, and Pynchon. HBO evangelists have proclaimed that the television series is already the dominant narrative form for the 21^st century, as film had been for the twentieth, and the novel had been for the nineteenth1. Whether or not this kind of hyperbole is justified remains to be seen, but when the most frequently discussed question within a university’s English literature department is no longer ‘what book do you recommend?’ but ‘which series should I be watching?’, it seems obvious that something has certainly changed.

• 2 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York, New York University (...)
• 3 Roberta E. Pearson, “Lost in Transition: From Post-Network to Post-Television”, in J. McCabe and K. (...)

2Ironically, this transformation of television culture has occurred during the exact period in which television itself has in many ways experienced its demise: the medium’s third era, in which its boundaries are challenged and reframed by the rise of digital culture and media convergence2, is referred to as ‘post-television’ in the same way that its second era was ‘post-network3’. In certain ways, the television medium therefore seems to be experiencing this Golden Age posthumously, though perhaps we should be careful before we proclaim yet another narrative medium officially deceased.

• 4 Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, Florence, Psyc (...)
• 5 While American productions remain the global norm for trends in serialized TV drama, recent Europea (...)
• 6 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, London, Routledge, 2010.

3One of the most remarkable transformations in this period of widespread acclaim for certain kinds of new televisual content has been the prominence of fantastical genres. Long a fringe phenomenon within scripted television drama4, genres like fantasy, horror, and science fiction have played an increasingly dominant role in the development of 21^st-century ‘Quality TV’: American network hits like Lost (ABC, 2002-2010) and Heroes (NBC, 2006-2010), basic cable phenomena like Battlestar Galactica (SyFy, 2004-2009) and The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010- ), and premium cable productions from Dead Like Me (Showtime, 2003-2004) to True Blood (HBO, 2008-2014) are among the most widely acclaimed serialized television narratives5. HBO’s hit fantasy series Game of Thrones (2011- ) is not only the most successful exponent of this development, but it also demonstrates clearly how television’s adaptation of the content, the forms, and the discursive practices of other media have resulted in its recent increase in cultural capital6. It adapts not only a series of novels that had developed a small but very devoted fan base, but also a larger set of aesthetic and discursive practices that relate back to the institutional framework of American premium cable and ‘Quality TV.’

• 7 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London, Verso Books, 1989.

4As a case study that illuminates some of the key transformations in serialized television drama, it therefore suits not only the framework of shifting hierarchies of adaptive value in the context of media convergence and globalization: the narrative’s emphasis on political conflict in an imaginary world brings into sharp focus the relationship between fictional geopolitics and our own ‘post-ideological’ moment7. While the franchise’s status as a global cross-media phenomenon constitutes its own politics of adaptation, the ideology reflected by its world-building process simultaneously makes up an illuminating adaptation of politics. The overwhelming success of the Game of Thrones brand thus provides us with a unique opportunity to study not only the ways in which the ongoing transformation of media culture has affected traditional methods of adapting literary texts to other media, but also the complex cultural hierarchies that shape our reading of them.

• 8 Ginia Bellafante, ‘A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms’, in The New York Times, April 4^th, (...)
• 9 Tim Kenneally, ‘Game of Thrones Becomes Most Popular Series in HBO’s History’, in The Wrap, June 5^t (...)

7The first and most important obstacle for the producers of Game of Thrones to overcome was the low-brow perception of the fantasy genre. Many television critics initially sneered at the notion that a premium cable network like HBO would include this type of genre material in their established ‘Quality TV’ brand, with the New York Times describing it as ‘boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population's other half8’. But audiences and critics alike were soon won over, and Game of Thrones now stands as one of the most widely acclaimed series in HBO’s current roster of programs, with its fourth season breaking the network’s viewership record previously held by the final series of The Sopranos9.

• 10 Jane Feuer, ‘The MTM Style’, in S. Feuer, P. Kerr and T. Vahimagi (eds.), MTM ‘Quality Television’, (...)

8A key element in the series’ success has been its producers’ successful negotiation of the text’s relationship to its generic affiliation on the one hand, and its position within the format of premium cable ‘Quality TV’ on the other. This concept of ‘Quality TV’ is constructed around the notion of appealing to a particular audience with abundant disposable income, and has traditionally been organized around hybrid texts that combined familiar television formats with themes and aesthetics drawn from more celebrated sources such as the Hollywood gangster film, romantic comedy, and European arthouse cinema. Following the basic format established in the early 1980s by production company MTM, HBO was the first cable TV company to foreground its programming’s high art connections by emphasizing ‘character development, structural complexity, reflexivity, [and] aesthetic innovation10’. This formula ensured the critical success of series ranging from HBO’s own The Sopranos (1999-2007) and Sex and the City (1998-2004) to Showtime hits like Homeland (2011- ) and Californication (2007-2014), all of which are designed to appeal primarily to premium cable’s coveted audience of upper-middle class subscribers with abundant disposable income.

• 11 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MIT Press, 20 (...)
• 12 Henry Jenkins, op. cit.
• 13 Jim Collins, Bring On the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Durham, (...)

9The ‘quality TV’ meta-genre should therefore be read primarily as a form of adaptation, successfully ‘remediating11’ the aesthetics of cinema on the one hand, and the narrative structure of the 19^th-century realist novel on the other. But at the same time, television’s strategic incorporation of elements from other media occurred within a context in which all narrative media were fully engaged in a complex process of technological and cultural convergence12. Jim Collins describes the resulting alignment between cinema and literature as a new kind of ‘cine-literary culture,’ allowing for ‘an unprecedented interdependency of the publishing, film, and television industries, which can reach that “public at large” wherever it may be with ever greater proficiency13’. The flattening out of former cultural hierarchies therefore results in an environment in which changing social practices alongside the increasing conglomeration of media industries has made the consumption of ‘quality TV’ a cine-literary experience that creates new value for corporate producers like HBO.

• 14 John T. Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television, New Brunswick, (...)
• 15 Marc Leverette, ‘Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits’, in M. Leverette, B.L. Ott and C.L. Buckley (eds.) (...)
• 16 Robin Nelson, ‘Quality TV Drama: Estimations and Influences Through Time and Space’, in J. McCabe a (...)
• 17 Sarah Cardwell, ‘Is Quality Television Any Good?’, in J. McCabe and K. Akass (eds.), Quality TV: Co (...)

10This appeal hinges on HBO’s identity as a premium brand offering boutique programming, perpetually constructing for itself ‘an air of selectivity, refinement, uniqueness, and privilege14’. For HBO and other television producers in the post-network era, the careful development of this brand identity has relied on the way in which it ‘offers consumers a place where it’s okay to be transgressive with regard to mainstream television15’. Premium cable’s drama series tend to offer this kind of televisual transgression by including depictions of nudity, sex, and violence, alongside generous profanity, thus differentiating itself from ‘normal’ network TV drama and its traditional policy of offering ‘least objectionable programming (LOP)16’. These characteristics have become so institutionalized and predictable that the term ‘Quality’ in this context should be taken not so much as an actual qualitative distinction, but as identifying ‘a set of generic traits that distinguishes a group identity17’.

• 19 Sarah Hughes, ‘“Sopranos Meets Middle-earth”: How Game of Thrones Took Over Our World’, The Guardia (...)
• 20 Roberta E. Pearson, op. cit., p. 241.

12Described by some as ‘The Sopranos meets The Lord of the Rings19’, Game of Thrones combines the cinematic visual spectacle of pseudo-medieval high fantasy with the tonal register of adult-oriented Quality TV, adapting what was generally viewed as an immature niche genre to HBO's upmarket brand identity. Commensurate with this seal of cultural respectability is the explicit identification of an author figure who is responsible for the text – which, in the case of Game of Thrones, is not only identified in the writerly persona of George R.R. Martin, but also in the series’ celebrated duo of executive producers, David Benioff and Daniel B. Weiss. Their co-authorship of the television adaptation, which is emphasized throughout the series’ promotional materials, reflects the historical development through which show runners and executive producers gained ever greater public prominence as celebrated creative forces, ‘because their names proved more attractive to demographically desirable audiences than did the network brand20’.

• 21 Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, ‘It's Not TV, It’s HBO’s Original Programming: Producing Quality TV’, i (...)
• 22 Ibid., p. 89.

13This foregrounding of author figures activates specific discourses of fidelity and literacy, and in a way that places ‘a high premium on the kind of authorship more commonly associated with traditional art forms carrying high cultural kudos: theater, international art cinema, and literature21’. In the case of Game of Thrones, the series’ systematic incorporation of brutal violence and explicit sex scenes thus functions not only to ‘liberate television fiction from the laws governing established creative practices and writing styles22’, as is by now customary for premium cable productions; it also adapts the fantasy genre in a way that makes it more attractive and accessible to a very particular and explicitly adult audience, thus dramatically increasing its commodity value.

• 23 Sudeep Dasgupta, ‘Policing the People: Television Studies and the Problem of “Quality”’, NECSUS, Vo (...)

14Game of Thrones should therefore be seen as an adaptation in multiple senses: not only as a television show that adapts a series of novels, but also as the adaptation of an industrial framework that expands the existing parameters of what constitutes ‘Quality TV’ in the post-network era. At the same time, the series has managed to re-articulate and re-organize key generic features of high fantasy and its audience. Premium cable appeals to its core viewers because it ‘minimizes the value of popular television and popular culture in general while marketing and addressing seemingly non-televisual programs to upscale television audiences23’. The development of Quality TV is also an intensely gendered form of cultural discourse:

• 25 Mark J.P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The History and Theory of Subcreation, London, Routledge (...)
• 26 While Ekman’s study acknowledges that many fantasy books are published without accompanying maps, h (...)

16The promotional material surrounding the first season of Game of Thrones generally emphasized the ways in which it departed from general preconceptions about the fantasy genre, most noticeably in the emphasis on complex, adult storytelling. One of the generic features of the fantasy genre that has been left intact both in Martin's novels and in the TV adaptation is the strong emphasis on the mapping of imaginary geographical spaces, as is so often the case with ‘secondary worlds25’. With many varieties of high fantasy literature, one is all but forced to keep the accompanying maps handy while reading, as one’s understanding of the narrative is mostly predicated on the ability to follow the characters' trajectories through this fictitious geography. In many fantasy franchises devoted to the development of imaginary worlds, this emphasis on mapping out the diegetic environment shifts the audience’s focus from the narrative’s causal chain to the complex environment that sustains it, something Stefan Ekman refers to as a ‘topofocal’ – or place-centric – approach, in which ‘setting is as important as character and plot’26.

• 27 As the series moves through its yearly seasons, the animated map in the opening credits has changed (...)
• 28 See for example the interactive Google Map of Westeros created by fans (see Ben Beaumont-Thomas, ‘G (...)

17The books in the series include multiple maps of the lands of Westeros and the franchise's other notable imaginary areas, which prove to be essential in order to form a basic understanding of the narrative events. Similarly, the opening credits of the TV version present an animated rendition of this geographical map, offering the viewer helpful weekly reminders of the spatial relations between the story’s key locations27. In addition, fan-made maps and highly detailed breakdowns of the series’ various national histories and geographies have proliferated on the web, further emphasizing the crucial role played by the literal mapping of space in this fantasy environment28.

• 30 Ibid., p. 253.
• 31 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, Harvard Univer (...)

19The high fantasy genre and its insistent mapping of imaginary space is therefore all the more remarkable for the fact that its narratives are resolutely anti-modern, even as they rely so heavily on quintessentially modern organizations of space and time that produce what Harvey calls ‘a homogenization and reification of the rich diversity of spatial itineraries and spatial stories,’ while ‘eliminating little by little all traces of the practices that produce it30’. Or, as Negri and Hardt would put it: ‘Modernity replaced the traditional transcendence of command with the transcendence of the ordering function31’. In other words, the kind of mapping so commonly associated with fantasy world-building automatically suggests a politics of conquest and imperialism, as the individual character’s abilities to navigate these spaces become the default focus.

• 32 David Harvey, op. cit., p. 10-38.
• 33 Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpr (...)

2020^th-century modernist literature destabilized this early modern sense of spatio-temporal coherence, fracturing the integrity of space and time by its intensely subjective forms of representation32, and late 20^th-century postmodernism represented an even more radical challenge to our ability to develop what Jameson describes as a cognitive map of our environment33. The contemporary popularity of high fantasy may therefore be understood in part at least as a response to the genre’s dialectical tension between the pre-modern worlds they tend to articulate, and their fundamentally modern ways of organizing and representing them.

• 34 David Harvey, op. cit., p. 252.
• 35 One central irony of the series is that the larger threat to the inhabitants of Westeros actually c (...)

21The most problematic aspect of this preoccupation with the mapping out of geopolitical spaces is the way this naturalizes a fundamentally political dichotomy between a Western ‘us’ and non-Western ‘Other,’ occupying ‘a specific place in a spatial order that was ethnocentrically conceived to have homogeneous and absolute qualities34’. The way in which these maps organize the narrative’s physical and conceptual space into a basic binary distinction between the civilized world of Westeros and the more mystical, dangerous, and generally more primitive areas to the east and south reflect a very specific tradition of the high fantasy genre that articulates a distinctly Eurocentric perspective35. Visits to the foreign lands surrounding the central kingdoms of Westeros demonstrate the conventional forms of Orientalism, as both the non-Western geographies and their inhabitants are portrayed as mysterious, unchanging, backwards, and treacherous. Therefore, although Game of Thrones does not entirely duplicate Tolkien's more rampant xenophobia, the series’ structural distinction between a Western ‘us’ and a mystical, foreign ‘other’ does clearly re-articulate the genre’s traditional Eurocentric construction of global geopolitics.

• 36 Tellingly, characters who live in ‘the North’ of Westeros have (mostly) Northern-English or Scottis (...)
• 37 Edward Saïd, Orientalism: 25th Anniversary Edition, New York, Vintage, 2004.

23The series’ racial politics in relation to its spatial organization is even more pronounced in the television adaptation, where the ‘Common Tongue’ in Westeros is English36, while the inhabitants of Essos speak in made-up languages like ‘High Vallyrian,’ which are subtitled. The result is that the distinction between the ‘normal’ space of the kingdoms of Westeros, as a fantastical hybrid that fuses the British isles with continental Europe, systematically privileges the Eurocentric perspective over its available alternatives. While the series does go out of its way to cast its characters in such a way that none of these more ‘primitive’ lands can be directly related to a single real-world equivalent, the overall effect strongly reinforces the Orientalist conceit that projects a radical otherness onto the East37.

• 38 While some may argue that Game of Thrones depicts many of its Western characters negatively, there (...)

24The politics of this patronizing representation of non-Western spaces becomes most painfully obvious in the extended subplot of Daenerys’s quest to liberate the slaves in several city-states in the southern region of Essos, located around Slaver’s Bay. The motif of an enlightened ‘white messiah’ liberating non-Western cultures from their backward ways has a long history in Western literature and cinema, with countless examples ranging from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘White Man’s Burden’ (1899) to Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). The fact that Daenerys happens to be a female white messiah whose naïve actions produce unexpected complications should not be interpreted as especially progressive in terms of the series’ fundamental Orientalism: the key point is that the civilizations outside of Westeros, populated by people of color, are once again shown to be unable to control their own destinies, requiring the intervention of a ‘more advanced’ outsider. In spite of Game of Thrones’ aesthetic sophistication, narrative complexity, and adult sensibilities, the way it therefore maps out its world still tends to fall in line with a reactionary form of politics that privileges the Western perspective while applying generic but nevertheless egregious stereotypes to its imagined, non-Western ‘other.38’

• 39 Deborah L. Jaramillo, ‘The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction (...)

25The mapping out of difference within the diegetic world of Game of Thrones reflects and enhances the current transformation of television as an important bearer of cine-literary cultural capital. As described above, the series’ appeal to its largest audience derived not from its relationship to its literary source, which for most viewers formed an obstacle rather than an attraction. While the publicity campaign made good use of the novels’ readership as online ‘influencers’ whose extensive use of social media provided the first season with positive ‘buzz’, most promotional materials distributed by HBO foregrounded the show’s complexity, its maturity, and its novelty. Paradoxically, the series’ respectability came to rely on familiar ‘Quality TV’ ingredients like its harsh violence, its uncompromising cynicism, and its frank depiction of sexual acts. The class-based prejudice that has legitimized this practice ‘implies that pay cable consumers can handle graphic language, sex, and violence in a more thoughtful and productive way than broadcast viewers39’.

• 40 See Valerie E. Frankel, Women in Game of Thrones: Power, Conformity and Resistance, Jefferson, McFa (...)
• 41 Anna Holmes, ‘Skin is Wearing Thin on HBO’s Game of Thrones’, in The Washington Post, April 27^th, 2 (...)

26In its depiction of sex and (female) nudity, the series pays lip service to the books’ cynical perspective on sex and the female body as a form of currency in its pseudo-medieval society. But more than this, several critics have pointed out that the show's constant flaunting of naked female bodies, quickly and astutely dubbed 'sexposition' by blogger and cultural critic Myles McNutt40, has more to do with the kind of audience the series is addressing, and its obvious attempts to rid itself of those genre elements that have limited high fantasy to a primarily fan-driven audience. Indeed, ‘the show’s softly lit and erotic staging of any scene involving a naked woman evokes Playboy of the 1960s and ’70s more than it underscores sexual politics or a culture of violence41’. At the same time, the series makes sure that it caters to progressive tastes and female viewers by including many women characters in non-traditional gender roles, including Brienne, Arya, and Daenerys.

• 43 Ibid., p. 7.

29Game of Thrones’ discursive authenticity as an example of the cultural logic of gentrification resides not only in the many paratextual reassurances that the show is faithful to its literary source. It is also and perhaps even more visible in its uncompromising dedication to premium cable’s familiar kind of ‘most objectionable programming’ involving sex and violence. While distancing itself from popular perceptions of the supposedly infantile fantasy genre, Game of Thrones offers value to those ‘hipsters and gentrifiers’ who continuously seek out novel but crucially ‘authentic’ experiences43, and who of course also happen to make up HBO’s most desirable audience.

• 44 In the fourth-season episode ‘Oathkeeper,’ the transformation of an already-incestuous sex scene be (...)

30The show’s tendency to court controversy therefore makes more sense once we perceive it from this perspective of gritty, uncompromising authenticity, and the way it continuously distinguishes HBO’s brand identity from ‘normal’ network television. As the series has developed throughout its first four seasons, it has in fact adapted the most violent and controversial moments from the novels by making them even more extreme than the already somewhat notorious source texts44. For instance, in the third-season episode that adapts the ‘Red Wedding’ chapter from the novel A Storm of Swords (2000), the mass murder that takes place on-screen involves not only the grisly deaths of popular leading characters Robb and Catelyn Stark, but also that of Robb’s fiancée, whose pregnant belly is graphically stabbed several times before her throat is slit. The show-runners thus made the scene not only as graphically violent as possible, but adapted it for television in a way that made an already grisly sequence a great deal more upsetting and controversial, resulting in a great deal of desirable media attention that once again emphasized the show’s ‘gritty’ and ‘uncompromising’ authenticity.