Well, there were several mindsets at work there. Lena Headey had this to say, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau took it this way, and then there was all of this. Rapey as it was, I don’t believe they meant for it to be perceived as quite as rapey as it was (rightfully) perceived. In any event, it was a poor directorial choice if they really didn’t want “sister-rapist” added to Jaime’s already excessive list of character demerits.
Really? I can’t speak to Carnivale since I never saw it, but I don’t remember there being much advantage to being a prostitute in Deadwood over being one in Westeros. I suppose they stayed dressed more often, but I think only Joanie Stubbs comes out even slightly ahead of the game (at least, compared to nearly every other “woman of negotiable affection” in both series). Could just be that seeing naked women sprawled around the lobby of the Bella Union just wouldn’t look right for a Western, but somehow looks more appropriate in a quasi-barbaric Dark-Ages-esque fantasy. I dunno.
I think it would objectively be a good thing if HBO executives stopped taking directors aside and asking them to add full-frontal nudity in order to appeal to the “pervert side of the audience.” In that case, Neil Marshall was not adding nudity he felt it belonged in the narrative, he was adding it to appeal to HBO’s demands. HBO is the one conceptualizing its audience as perverts and then trying to appeal to them. I think that should stop. That doesn’t mean an end to all nudity, but it would mean an end to gratuitous nudity.
What is special about nudity that makes gratuitous nudity wrong? And if the nudity is not gratuitous, but is there for a specific reason, to provide spectacle, then what’s the problem there?
She meant unnecessary nudity, ones that exist only to increase viewership to the show. Still, nudity can be allowed for both sexes, but only when they’re necessary to the plot; otherwise, it just plain fanservice.
I can totally see a bunch of outraged dudes calling in to complain about their favorite show having way too much dick it, it’s TOTALLY GAY and I DON’T WANT TO SEE THAT.
It would be interesting to find out exactly who told Marshall to do this. An executive producer of the show represents the show itself, and may not actually be an HBO executive. IMDB lists eleven Executive or Co-Executive Producers on the show over five seasons, including George R. R. Martin himself, and many of those would be simply writers on the show (Benioff and Weiss are, of course, the showrunners). Maybe it was Frank Doelger or Vince Gerardis, who don’t seem to have written or directed any GoT episodes (which is somewhat unusual for an E.P. on a TV show).
In any case, unless HBO does things very differently from the last time I worked for them, my first guess wouldn’t be that this edict came from the network itself.
This is very funny, because when I read the post you’re replying to, the first thing I thought of was that I have just come home from dinner at a 3-star Michelin restaurant and our table did have a spirited conversation about Game of Thrones (amidst a lot of other discussions, obviously). High-brow, low-brow…who knows?
Exciting trivia - did you know that Bray (pop ~4500) is the smallest place to have two 3 star Michelin restaurants, and the next smallest is Strasbourg (pop ~300000)?
For a while it seemed like gay story arcs in HBO shows were becoming inevitable (Six Feet Under for instance) but then I think they realized they had the gay demographic anyway, so, if anything HBO seems to already be past Peak Gay.
Is past Peak Gay anything like postmodern or post punk? From my understanding the latter is a bit of a misnomer, and post punk existed pretty much in the same time period as punk. So should I surmise that the past peak gay epoch is still pretty gay? (Nothing wrong with that right?) Why is culture so hard?
But that scene still worked fine. And it only felt artificial because of all the T&A that came (sorrynotsorry) before it - there’s so much it’s become background radiation for the show.
