Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Fantasy on TV: How 'Game of Thrones' Succeeds Where 'True Blood' Fails

After a summer when HBO garnered critical acclaim and new audiences with its epic fantasy series Game of Thrones, it's been fascinating to watch True Blood, the show that introduced HBO to the genre, go dramatically off the rails in its fourth season. Both shows face the challenges of mustering very large casts in the service of complex storylines that are not always obviously related to each other, along with detailed magical mythologies and histories. But while Game of Thrones hewed closely to the original plotlines and pacing in George R.R. Martin's book, Alan Ball and his writing staff have diverged wildly from Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire mysteries as they've moved deeper into True Blood. Taken together, the two shows represent the perils and opportunities of adapting an existing fantasy franchise.

Harris's Southern Vampire books may be fairly conventional paranormal romances, lacking some of the higher-level philosophical and mythological resonances Alan Ball's added to the franchise. But they're an impressive example of world-building and pacing. Harris started out with vampires and shape-shifters, giving readers a grounded sense of those concepts and mythologies before adding werewolf hierarchies in the third book, witches in the fourth, and faeries in the eighth. That pacing gave readers time to get a full sense of how different kinds of magic work before introducing new part of the world and explaining how different concepts interacted.

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