All these Thrones sequels are a mess

How to screw up a franchise one step at a time...

• We’re blessed with some truly incredible television on our screens right now. But, while writing Tuesday’s newsletter on one of those shows, I started wondering why there’s no TV juggernaut dominating the conversation right now. What happened to all of those Game of Thrones spinoffs? It turns out there should have been several attempts by now - if HBO didn’t shove a sword down its own throat. Let’s go…

Imagine this. You’re the owner of the world’s biggest TV show. Season one went okay, season two did even better. From the third season onward, most of the world was watching, dissecting and debating every single moment of every single episode in a dragon’s fire-breath of internet hot takes.

It’s become the only TV show anyone cares about.

But you know the end is coming. It’s all planned out. By season six, you have to start writing the ending yourself as the mega-popular book series it’s based on isn’t finished yet. The actors, directors, show-runners, every single one of the hundreds of people wrapped up in making this diabolically expensive show, have contracts that last for eight seasons. Afterwards, that’s it. Done and dusted. Finished. The end.

You even know the exact date this will happen: May 19, 2019.

So you make plans for several spin-offs well in advance. You have one ready to go to fill that gaping hole the moment your pop culture-dominating behemoth departs the airwaves. You debut the first trailer just as that finale ends to make the most of its record-breaking viewing numbers. And you hype the hell out of all of the other multiverse-expanding spinoffs you’ve got planned to keep everyone tuned into your cable viewing platform and brand new streaming service.

Oh wait. No you don’t. If you’re HBO, you don’t do any of that.

If you’re HBO, you shrug your shoulders, muck around for nearly two years, cancel the first planned spinoff before it’s even made it past the pilot stage, and you hang all your avid Thrones fans out to dry. That’s exactly what HBO has done. And it’s a debacle.

Honestly, this kind of high-level tele-visual fuck-up absolutely blows my mind. Marvel has managed to release a new blockbuster film every five months or so for the past 10 years. The rebooted Star Wars franchise has nearly a dozen spinoffs planned for its surprise hit The Mandalorian. Eleven seasons in, and despite sluggish ratings, The Walking Dead is still going strong with multiple movies and TV shows in the pipeline.

When even bung old CSI can plan three separate spinoff shows, HBO leaving its millions of Thrones fans in limbo for nearly two years is a stunning miscalculation.

By now, they might have completely blown it. After that disastrous finale aired, it feels like that ship might have sailed off to Braavos. Does anyone even care about Thrones any more? From the tone of this newsletter, it might sound like I do. I really don’t.

But I am interested in how the hell HBO managed to blow this so incredibly badly.

Casey Bloys, HBO’s chief content officer, has been busy trying to make out that the company is focused on producing quality Thrones spinoffs, not bashing out shows for the sake of it. “The way we try to approach it is not by (saying), ‘We need five shows within three years,’ but ‘What are the stories worth telling?’” he told The Hollywood Reporter in January.

That’s a bullshit statement because that’s exactly what HBO’s always done, they focus on quality. It’s why they have some of the best TV shows ever made on its roster, including The Wire, The Sopranos, Watchmen, Veep and Six Feet Under. It’s how HBO made their name. They don’t make rubbish. They’re still the best in the business at that. That’s not what I’m criticising here.

What I’m criticising is the complete lack of planning to take advantage of their ownership of the world’s biggest TV franchise. That’s quite a responsibility. So far, they’ve blown it completely.

It just seems ridiculous.

Right now, here’s where we stand. An untitled spinoff, destined to be the first post-Thrones show, was scrapped after the pilot was shot. We’ll never see a single second of it. “I loved it. But to this day I can’t. I can’t say anything,” the show’s star, Naomi Watts, recently told Collider. That sounds like a mess, but I’m kind of desperate to see it. Let’s hope it somehow makes it to Dead Pilots Society, the new podcast that examines failed TV pilots (and is well worth a listen).

Several other Thrones pilots are also underway: the prequel House of the Dragon has been green-lit and starts shooting in April; pilots for prequels 9 Voyages and 10,000 Ships are underway, and an untitled series based in the King’s Landing slums is also planned. All going well, we might see the first glimpse of one of these sometime near the end of next year. That’s 2022!

“We've been developing multiple takes on different worlds,” Bloys told The Hollywood Reporter in that same interview. “The one I want to do is the one that I think is best creatively. I prefer to make it about the stories and the showrunners and their vision as opposed to hitting some arbitrary target for the right number of shows.”

Well, sure. But three years is a long time to leave viewers hanging. The TV landscape has changed completely since Thrones departed. Netflix is bigger than ever. So is Amazon Prime Video, who has a potential Thrones replacement coming with the New Zealand-shot Lord of the Rings.

Disney+ has arrived on the scene and has its own Death Star domination plans with all those Mandalorian and Marvel movie spinoffs. Although no one really talks about it, Apple TV+ is playing the long game, slowly amassing a tidy library of quality shows, and that could eventually pay off too.

That just piles even more pressure on the first dragon egg to hatch. If that first Thrones prequel sucks? Well, it’s likely the rest of them face the same demise as the one fronted by Naomi Watts: King Casey Bloys will pick up his sword and chop their heads clean off. What a waste.

Your weekend watch list…

• Nate Bargatze doesn’t swear, doesn’t do accents, and doesn’t tell many stories. So how the hell is the stand-up comic so funny? I spent much of his new Netflix special The Greatest Average American trying to work that out, and I still don’t have the answer. He is very good though.

• YouTube has the first two episodes of the four-part Demi Lovato documentary Dancing with the Devil up now, and it looks intense. The pop star doesn’t hold back on the issues she’s had with drugs and literally everything else.

• Finally, if you’re missing Jackass, Netflix’s Bad Trip might just be the thing that will fill the gap. This trailer is pretty much self-explanatory…

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