Things are hotting up in Westeros but Kieran Mathers wonders just how far a show should go to keep its audience interested. Perhaps the Starks just need a brisk walk…
An awful lot of Game of Thrones is exposition. It’s not a police procedural, after all, and the world has to be defined through dialogue as there is little else to relate it to an unfamiliar audience. Disguising this exposition is one of the hardest tricks for a writer to pull off. One solution is to have a distraction or a gimmick to make such scenes more visually interesting. TV is a visual medium and has been taking advantage of this for a long time.
A great example of this is The West Wing. To keep expository scenes interesting, writer Aaron Sorkin made the characters walk. It didn’t matter where they were walking, just that the dialogue had some action to it. He later admitted the only reason he had done this is to stop characters talking to each other statically, and in the process created a new verb: ‘To sorkin’ – the act of walking fiercely in one direction while holding a rapid-fire conversation. Intelligence and a good sense of direction is required.
However, Game of Thrones has discovered something different in the form of visual gimmicks: noble butchery and … sigh … lesbian tryouts. I wish I were kidding.
