Story Versus Spectacle: Understanding The Divide Within Entertainment
The stir around ‘Game of Thrones’ brought out a fundamental dilemma in the pop culture-verse: should we expect every piece of entertainment to be a jaw-dropping spectacle, or simply an engaging narrative in its own right?
Game of Thrones was everything a television company could have asked for. In the age of niche television, on-demand streaming, and binge-enabled entertainment, Thrones was a remnant of TV’s monoculture era. It was the go-to material for casual interactions in real life and social media. By the time Season Eight rolled around, anyone who didn’t watch the show was the odd man out. Game of Thrones became popular culture, and anyone who refused to participate was a pariah.
Then something unusual happened. Amid all the constant theorizing, astonishing CGI, and drawn-out battle sequences, Thrones stopped satisfying the majority of its rabid fan base. The same people who organized conventions, devised intricate plot theories, and built up archives of fan-edited encyclopedia content for George R.R Martin’s books — long before the HBO series — were duped. The show underwent a fundamental overhaul in Season Seven; timelines were expedited, understanding of fantasy elements was shortchanged, and plot development took a plunge. Game of Thrones sacrificed its narrative complexity for production value and timeliness.
Because of this, old-line fans of the show and book series have a right to be upset with HBO. They kept up the Thrones fandom for two decades, before the television series left them waiting at the altar in its final seasons. It was the entertainment equivalent of a politician discarding his or her political base after an election — and equally as resentful of a circumstance.
At the same time, casual observers hold the right to simply enjoy the end product. While the show certainly broke barriers with its production, it also may be the last piece of entertainment that is enjoyed at the same time by everyone. Those two developments would not have been possible had the showrunners distributed the same level of screen time to withstanding character arcs. Thrones would not have become as popular as it did if the show held onto its prior narrative pace.
In essence, Game of Thrones chose to sour its die-hard fans in order to appeal to a broader audience. And it worked: HBO turned the series into a Super Bowl-esque event each Sunday night of Season Eight. Whether the move was worth it for a media giant that prides itself on passionate storytelling is irrelevant. HBO made the series the most successful television show of all-time and will forever own its rights.
The best we can do is dissect the larger chasm that has divided GoT fans, production companies, and modern entertainment industries for a while: story versus spectacle.
A few months ago, I found the movie Good Time while scrolling through Prime Video. I played it and quickly found it to be one of the most intensely spine-tingling films I had ever seen. Robert Pattinson stars as a sociopathic bank robber trying to gather $10,000 to bail his mentally disabled brother out of jail in one night. The twists and turns along with quality production made the movie a delicate mix of Die Hard and Pulp Fiction — two of the most iconic films of the past thirty years.
For those hearing about Good Time for the first time, that praise is not farfetched. It, like Die Hard and Pulp Fiction, received wide-ranging critical acclaim and amassed a cult-like following when it debuted. The New Yorker even proclaimed it “an instant crime classic in the age of Trump.” But there is one big, nagging discrepancy: Good Time grossed a measly two million dollars in domestic revenue. The movie was an afterthought, floating through the far reaches of the internet and streaming content. It’s unclear whether the film even generated a profit in theaters.
The reason for that is fairly evident: Good Time sold out on its story. In a world where mindless ploys to save dinosaurs (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) and outlandish car chases to take down rogue assassins (Furious 7) regularly gross upwards of a billion dollars, exceptional stories are becoming less and less valued.
Out of the 25 highest grossing films of all-time, only one is not part of a larger franchise and excludes massive amounts of CGI: Titanic (1997).
For that reason, good storytelling has become secondary in modern filmmaking and entertainment. Throw on some superheroes or terrifying behemoths and watch any movie become a rousing box-office success. And that’s all the big production companies care about: their bottom line.
With that context, it’s easier to understand why Game of Thrones drastically pivoted in its final seasons. The showrunners do run the show, for all we know, but HBO ultimately had to sign off on any decision they made. Knowing that a big spectacle fills seats or, in HBO’s case, skyrockets subscriptions, it was a no-brainer agreement for them.
The real question we should ask is why are we paying for big-budget studios to minimize their stories?
The phrase that perhaps best encapsulates the problem within the entertainment industry is from 21st century market researcher Howard Moskowitz. He came back to PepsiCo with this response after they had asked him to conduct studies on the perfect Diet Pepsi formula: “You have been looking for the perfect Pepsi. You’re wrong. You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis.”
According to Malcolm Gladwell’s What The Dog Saw book, the phrase signified one of the biggest discoveries in all of food science, and it drew from the simplest of truths. People are different. Every person has their own individual likes, dislikes, necessities, and desires. Though consumers can’t universally be assigned into one group, they fall into general clusters in accordance with their tastes.
However, oftentimes people cannot even correctly identify what they want. For instance, if you took a survey of what type of coffee people prefer to drink, most would reply they like to drink strong and rich coffee. But experiments have shown that the overwhelming majority of people enjoy medium or weak coffee. You would have never gotten to that conclusion if you only asked them; being more active and vigilant was necessary.
The same concept applies in entertainment. If you took a survey of what type of movie people most prefer to watch, most would reply they love a movie with a good story. But if you looked around movie theaters or at box office numbers, you would see those two data sets would not add up. Although they would not admit it, most people would rather see a jaw-dropping spectacle than a good story. It is a simple fact of this day and age. Good stories are becoming a niche market within entertainment.
Another one of Moskowitz’s sayings is: “to a worm in horseradish, the entire world is horseradish.” If you’re one those people who absolutely loves big-production entertainment, all the power to you; the entire industry really is becoming a blissful spectacle. Nonetheless, if you fall somewhere else on that spectrum and find yourself dissatisfied with the current state of entertainment, peer outside your bubble and experiment in the depths of new-age streaming content. The entire world does not necessarily have to be filled with just horseradish.
Karim Noorani is a Senior Creative at UNPLUGG’D , an entertainment junkie, and an avid NBA fan. You can follow him on Twitter here.
