House of the Dragon begins its second season this evening, and I am here to tell you/remind me/inform you/correct you, that this is a stupid, primetime drama that is guilty of the three following crimes:
It confuses vulgarity with profundity. As someone who throws around lots of unnecessarily vulgarity, for example, “This show is fucking dog shit” was the original title of this piece, I am qualified to make such claims. But unlike my silly reliance on swears, House of the Dragon thinks its brutality, especially in season one’s depictions of child birth and pregnancy, and its HERE’S THE THEME catchphrase, “the womb is the battlefield” (or some bullshit like that), is commentary, thinks it is being meaningfully profound.
There is something there in showing that this culture (which is our culture, get it, TV show so smart, make commentary), sees women as, well, the way the right sees women, but the value of it is lost in a sea of blood spilled from a gratuitous torture porn level depiction of a cesarian, which the show thinks it earns because it has it thematic catchphrase and…It thinks the GoT branding means it’s already earned the right to its vulgarity and gratuitous violence, even though GoT bled out all of its narrative and artistic credibility in the second half of its run.
There is an idea in art that you have to earn moments of extreme violence, either through the strength of the work, or through the establishment of genre.
When a genre as a whole earns that level of violence, the way torture porn (Saw, Hostile, Audition, Last House on the Left… not pornography with torture) has, it means the audience is aware of what they are watching, that the hallmarks of the genre (which is all a genre really is by the way, its a description of tools used in narrative) will be not just present, but forward, and what the audience has come for.
GoT is not a genre, and the reason its cruelty and brutality were successful, powerful, and meaningful, came from the fact the story was a subversion of the ye olden times fantasy narrative… at least until they made it past book three (and then even more so when they ran out of books to adapt), at which point GoT became a shallow, sensationalistic, primetime soap (with a few great episodes of TV mixed in)…Which is what House of the Dragon is, it’s Dynasty with dragons and incest. It’s a show about rich people squabbling, fucking, and fucking over each other, but with a bunch of fantasy content sprinkled all over it.
It’s a dumb, shallow, ugly show.
Look, if you like prime time soaps that are schlocky, melodramatic fun, that’s great. If you like the kinds of shows that used to be on TV, that we all watched, I mean, I like some of them too, and while that IS what GoT stumbled into being, that’s sure as shit not what it started as, and House of the Dragon is pretending so hard, so very hard that that’s not what it really is.
And yes, of course I’m watching it now as I type this, because one, it’s on, two, because I can ignore it just enough to do work, three, I do like sword fighting at dragons, and four, I can hate watch it the same way I did like 6 seasons of the Walking Dead (before I stopped watching that piece of shit).
When season 1 aired, I bailed after like 4, maybe 5 episodes, because frankly, I found it stupidly fucking offensive, and part of that wasn’t the show’s fault. I mean, how was it to know it was going to debut right in time for Dobbs to put an end to Roe, and in turn have its lazy, pretentious, self-indulgent “THEMES” play out to that?
And you might be thinking, “Doesn’t that make it more relevant, don’t people need to see this now more than ever in such an unflinching way?”
And the answer to that is, not when its this fucking smug, self-congratulating, artless, crass, insensitive, and lazy.
The show thinks that because it’s saying it’s “THEMES!” out loud, that it can get away with doing what it’s criticizing, and for some people that’s enough to stop everything, for some people, that’s enough to say “then maybe don’t do it”… But, that’s not how I feel.
I think if you’re self-aware, and you tell people "look how bad/wrong/dumb/evil this thing is”, you can still do it, you can still show it, you just have to do that well, you have to succeed in executing the theme, and the worse the thing, the more considered artful you have to be in doing so.
As stated above, this show is artless dog shit. It earns nothing, does nothing, and as a result, it is nothing.
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