It’s been 10 years since the first episode of Game of Thrones aired. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen on TV. Yet the series has not lived up to its initial promise of joining the glorious pantheon of enduring fantasy franchises like The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Somehow you don’t want to keep going back to it.
Today, a superhero story can be many things, from an R-rated comedy romp (Deadpool), to a grim character study (Joker). There is more depth in the genre now than ever before, and it can be traced back to one important question: “Who watches The Watchmen?”
He knows more about the Red Keep than Maester Pycelle, and can tell you what to feed a growing dragon. The obsessive Game of Thrones fan is creeping out of hibernation as we speak.
Raja Hooja is dead and Tantri is the new king. But to see Tantri the Mantri’s plan – of stealing the throne – finally work is like watching Arnab Goswami engage in responsible journalism. It’s a twist ending, and it alienates your core audience who have come to expect something entirely different.
It is impossible to watch HBO’s Chernobyl without one unsettling question gnawing away at your intellect: Could the worst nuclear accident in the history of humankind have been averted if documents containing vital information about structural damages and flaws in the design of the reactor hadn’t been redacted? The answer is almost too awful to contemplate.
Golden Globe-winner Big Little Lies starts as a show about women of privilege, but pivots into one about the interior lives of women whose lives are invariably marked by violence.
Nearly 20 years after the first film, and half a century after the book’s release, JRR Tolkien’s LoTR is returning to Amazon. It proves that tits, blood, and swear words do not a fantasy epic make.
The very elements – smart kids with a scientific bent of mind, a mysterious girl with psychokinetic and telepathic abilities, a monster who is difficult to defeat, and adults who carry immense emotional baggage – that made Stranger Things a phenomenon, are the things that are making it go from good to predictable every year. Truth is, it ain’t getting any stranger than this.