For more than 70 hours, Wesley Morris caught up with the dragons, beheadings and brinkmanship before the series finale. Here’s what he learned.
It’s too bad we call it bingeing. “Bingeing” is panicked pleasure. It’s pleasured shame. It’s disordered snacking. It’s 12 scoops of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Core when one is rumored to suffice. I say too bad that watching multiple episodes of a show in a single sitting has been stamped “bingeing” because I watched “Game of Thrones” for the first time last month — all of it — and none of that judginess captures what I felt.
Over the course of more than 70 hours, I experienced what I can describe only as the civilized rush of acquired conversancy. Describing that rush as a binge feels like a greasy artifact of the early streaming days, when a season of television would appear overnight, and you had the option to watch it once a day, maybe, or scarf it all down. Overnight.
The only way an entire season of “Game of Thrones” appears overnight is if you ignore it. And for about eight years and seven seasons that’s what I did. I thought I was being principled. The show started in 2011, deep in President Obama’s first term, and a feudal fantasy seemed like a complacent retreat. Whatever progress was supposed to look like, it seemed unlikely to be happening in this show’s fictional country of Westeros. But I also didn’t want to repeat the work I had already tried to do with other bleak, saga television, like “The Walking Dead.” Other people were going to have to watch the show for me.
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For most of a decade, I was Tom Hanks in “Cast Away” — actually, it might’ve been worse, since my Wilson would have been looking for other volleyballs to talk to about the Starks and Lannisters and White Walkers. I didn’t exit the island until April 3rd. Who can say why I did it? It’s true that I had been home and disgustingly sick for two weeks. But I also knew the end of “Game of Thrones” was nigh, and I wanted a taste of what the world was likely to be going through these past six weeks. I have friends who’ve created new careers out of their fandom and bottomless expertise. I’ve seen lines wind around the block to hear these people perform live recaps. So I broke down and got in line, too.
For a month, my diet included three or four episodes a day. Some days I watched more, almost entirely in my living room and on a television set. Often the credits rolled with me, by myself, saying “[expletive]” or “[expletive]” or simply nothing because when, say, a wedding suddenly becomes a blood bath, you can’t talk because you can’t breathe.
Toward the end, I sent my friend Alex a picture of Jon Snow on my TV, and he practically smacked his forehead in concern. He remembered what I put myself through watching five seasons of “Breaking Bad” in a few weeks before its finale. He remembered how that show’s mastery of moral and narrative suspense stressed me out. I finished in a couple of weeks, but it probably took a year off my life. To paraphrase Alex: I didn’t watch “Breaking Bad.” I smoked it. Or rather: It smoked me.
But my time with “Game of Thrones,”, while far from stressless, felt closer to reading. It’s based on the first five novels in George R. Martin’s series “A Song of Ice and Fire.” So you can actually read this story, too, at least until the production ran out of books. But as I made my way through the show, I spent a lot of time thinking about whose viewing relationship was healthier. It would take as long as a month to read Martin’s novels (yes, people have read them in less), and you’d need more than 100 hours to complete Robert A. Caro’s four books about Lyndon B.
