A new season of Game of Thrones is upon us, and... well, I'm looking forward to seeing Diana Rigg. Otherwise, the TV series is more of a fact on the ground than something I'm likely to get excited about. I'm going to try to get at some of the reasons why, using this Bryan Cogman interview from Rolling Stone as a jumping off point.
The annoying thing about that Cogman interview is the insistence on using pointless language like "book purists." I don't dispute that somewhere, out there in the vast wasteland of the Internet, there's someone who could adequately be called a book purist. But most criticism doesn't come from people who prefer the books over the show out of reflexive stubbornness. It comes from people who prefer the books because the books are less likely than the show to indulge laughable genre cliches, whitewash complex protagonists, diminish and objectify female characters, and generally prioritize cheap, familiar entertainment over anything more ambitious. A Song of Ice and Fire is not high art, but it's not from a tradition where you'd expect it to be. HBO drama, on the other hand, does create those expectations, and Game of Thrones resolutely fails to live up to them. The production values are high, the cast is solid, the direction is competent within its frame of reference, but the writing falls flat. And here's the thing: this isn't primarily a question of faithfulness to the source material. You could change the plot of A Song of Ice and Fire fare more radically than Game of Thrones does, and still wind with up something that was true to its themes while elevating the material above its pedestrian popular-fiction origins. You could, in short, make something that belongs on HBO, instead of something with an HBO budget that belongs on Showtime.
Let's look at the scene Cogman was discussing when he uttered the useless phrase "book purists." The contrived Robert/Cersei scene from season one. Lots of people love this scene. George R. R. Martin loves this scene, somehow. Cogman cites it as a freeing moment in Benioff and Weiss' evolution, the point at which they realized it was OK to make shit up to serve their story. The scene has issues simply as drama-- "seven kingdoms couldn't fill the hole she left behind" is a terrible piece of on-the-nose writing; Martin's dialogue, crafted to work alongside internal monologue and in the not-superficially-realistic mode of popular fiction, has its limitations, but he hasn't came up with anything that unbelievable-- but its deeper problem is one of adaptation.
Cogman defends the scene by suggesting that even if it isn't true to "book" Cersei and Robert, it's true to "show" Cersei and Robert. But that's the problem: because the TV show is generally so faithful, often to the point of lifting dialogue straight from the novels, most of the time "show" Cersei and Robert are "book" Cersei and Robert. Robert in particular hardly ever shows the contemplative side on display here, though the "first kill" conversation (which, in the interest of fairness, I'll say I like) is an exception. The show's softened take on Cersei is brought across more often, as in the crude, emotionally manipulative dead baby conversation with Catelyn earlier in the season. But the harder, nastier Cersei of the books is also present, as in the scene, drawn directly from the books, where Ned confronts her about the incest. That scene is pretty well impossible to square with the Robert/Cersei exchange, which has wandered in from a fundamentally different conception of the characters. The Robert and Cersei of the books are degraded, unpleasant human beings, and that fact determines their actions; you can't chuck in a random moment of more sympathetic behavior, then have them go back to acting like grotesques.* The problem isn't making the change; it's not thinking the change through in the context of the larger story.
The Cogman interview points to another, somewhat different example of this failure, one that brings us back to Daenerys and the House of Undying. ("Back" in the sense of their having been the subject of my first post nine months ago; I don't blame you for having forgotten.) Cogman says that for Dany "Season Two was basically about her screwing up a lot and learning from her mistakes." I'd love to see him pressed on that claim-- what precisely she learned, and what those mistakes were, apart from letting herself get caught up in Generic Fantasy Intrigue #27, complete with Stock Evil Wizard-- because the central feature of Dany's arc in season two is its pointlessness. In the books, Qarth is not the most essential storyline, but it provides Daenerys with uncertain prophecies to which she continues to respond in later volumes, and it gives the reader even more hints about the future, as well as helping to make clear the increasing significance of magic to the series. TV Qarth does none of those things. Well, I suppose Pyat Pree's magical cloning powers might fall under the "increasing significance of magic" banner, but that's not really enough to justify eight episodes. The key is the reduction of the House of the Undying from a major piece of eerie foreshadowing to a brief bit of fanservice with Dany's beloved rapist husband. Again, it's not the change that rankles, it's the failure to replace the removal of the storyline's payoff with anything else. Benioff and Weiss might just as well have had Dany go straight to Slaver's Bay, except that that would throw the timeline out of whack.
What weakens the dramatic integrity of adaptations like Game of Thrones and the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films is not that the ones doing them are not fans, but that they are fans... on a superficial level. Jackson, Benioff, and Weiss love moments, images, characters, and insist on shoehorning those things into storylines where, due to changes made by their non-fannish sides, those things no longer fit. (This is a good essay on how Peter Jackson falls into that trap.) They cut down half the forest, and expect individual trees to retain their beauty devoid of context, devoid of roots. "Purists" are accused of focusing on small things, but as any good critic can tell you, sometimes small things matter. Sometimes, without small things, all you have is empty grandeur.
*This points to one of the fundamental differences between the books and the show: their approach to moral ambiguity. Martin's moral ambiguity, while it does include characters who are capable of being both nice and nasty, also includes characters who are consistently nasty, but shown to be working, in their twisted way and within the twisted values of their society, from recognizable human motives. In other words, while not psychologically realistic in the way of stream-of-consciousness literature, the novels look at the psychology of monstrous behavior. Benioff and Weiss don't seem interested in that, and would prefer to make the less pleasant central characters more superficially likable by giving them banal moments of "humanity:" Cersei as grieving mother, Tywin Lannister as grandfatherly mentor. But don't let me get started on the Tywin/Arya scenes.
