However, this year came with a new brand of tea leaves, brought on by a significant change: whereas past years have seen winners determined by a limited blue-ribbon panel of voters in a given peer group, this year the voting was opened up to all members of said groups, meaning the voting pool increased exponentially. Reporting speculated that this could dramatically alter the winners, skewing toward populist series and diminishing the impact of the episode submissions that were typically considered crucial variables in the blue-ribbon panels’ decisions.

Accordingly, this year’s predictions narrative had more weight than usual, pushing those who were following the story to see each early win as a marker of a given narrative. And it didn’t take long for such a narrative to emerge, even if I joked about it being premature when I called it early on: HBO swept through the broadcast like the behemoth it once was, laying waste to numerous records in the process. Game of Thrones shattered the record for most wins by a series in a single year well before it won for Outstanding Drama Series, and Veep won three awards—including the fourth consecutive win for Julia Louis-Dreyfus and second for Tony Hale—before it emerged to dethrone Modern Family and take HBO’s second-ever win for Outstanding Comedy Series. Combine with Olive Kitteridge’s near-sweep of the Limited Series category—losing only Supporting Actress—and you have the most dominant performance for a single channel or network in recent Emmys history. It’s the first time that a single channel has taken home the TV Movie (Bessie), Limited Series (or Miniseries), Drama, and Comedy awards in the same year since the TV Movie category was added in 1980.

There are a large number of conclusions we could make based on this. We could discuss how the opening up of the voting pool privileged a show like Game of Thrones that has both large viewership and strength in the creative arts categories whose voters were previously unlikely to vote in the program awards. We might ask if the accessibility of HBO programming—both through elaborate screener DVD boxes sent to voters and through the ease of HBO Go/HBO Now—makes it more likely that voters have seen shows on the channel, versus some of the competition. We can ponder how the potential dilution of submitted episodes’ importance to the process privileged past winners and nominees with whom voters were familiar (thus giving Veep an advantage over newcomer Transparent, which won Lead Actor and Directing Emmys for Amazon Studios).

And yet here’s the thing about awards: we’ll never know. Although the social media consensus on my feed seems to be that Game of Thrones would have been more deserving in earlier seasons, or that Transparent was breaking more ground in comedy than Veep’s political satire, there’s every possibility Emmy voters felt Game of Thrones had its strongest year yet and Transparent was a drama masquerading as a comedy and dragged down by Maura’s unlikeable children. It becomes easy to forget in efforts to “solve” the Emmy voting process by turning it into an objective process that it is an inherently subjective one. And while I am an advocate for contextualizing the specific subjectivities that shape each year’s winners lest we accept the prestige they’ve come to represent as an asterisk-free marker of television greatness, this year’s awards reminded me and everyone else who follows the Emmys too closely that there will never be evidence to support any of our conclusions. We will never know exactly why a given series or performer or writer or director won an Emmy award. It is beyond our reach.

And yet lest the above read as an outright rejection of Emmys narratives, this was nonetheless a night that reinforced how the swirling subjectivity of industry awards can transform such that objective consensus emerges. Fitting given the night’s controversial spoiler-laden montage of series finales—which would’ve been harmless with fewer climactic moments chosen in editing—this was a night where two actors had their last chance to win an Emmy for a role that will define their career. And whereas Parks and Recreation’s Amy Poehler had her chance swept away by the HBO tide, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm emerged victorious, winning his first Emmy—and the first acting Emmy for any actor on the AMC series, inconceivably—and earning a standing ovation in the process.

Technically, that win inspires just as many questions. Had the tape system and limited voting pools held an often-reprehensible character back in previous years? Did all those HBO-happy voters feel about The Newsroom the way I felt about The Newsroom? And yet those questions don’t matter as much when the victory feels just, as was also the case when Viola Davis—the clear standout of the uneven How To Get Away With Murder—took to the stage after winning Lead Actress in a Drama Series and spoke eloquently and righteously about the struggle facing actresses of color when you don’t see people like you standing on that stage winning Emmys. It doesn’t matter if this new voting system was responsible for Davis’ win, because it was both a deserving performance—although there’s that subjectivity again—and because it represents a small step toward addressing the Academy’s longstanding struggle with diversity.

You could argue that “it doesn’t matter” describes the whole evening, and not just the various procedures that preceded it: it is very possible to overstate the importance of the Emmy Awards, as HBO publicity will helpfully—if deservedly—demonstrate over the next 24-72 hours. But Davis’ win stands out as an example of an Emmys moment that unquestionably matters, and pushes a deeper consideration into not simply who wins Emmys, but how they win them, and how that remains an area where greater work in diversity and representation can and should be explored by the Television Academy. And perhaps here we can make a distinction, then: it may be impossible to safely predict the Emmys, but it’s very possible to investigate that process with a critical eye, one that hopefully with move beyond procedures to the politics that underlie them in the years that follow.

This is the fourth installment in the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media.  This week’s contributor, Iain Robert Smith, completed his PhD in the department in 2011.

On Sunday, April 12^th, the fifth season of Game of Thrones will premiere simultaneously in more than 170 countries and territories. [1]  A truly transnational production with filming taking place this season in Northern Ireland, Croatia and Spain, Game of Thrones is both the most watched show in HBO’s history and the world’s most-pirated TV show.  Adapting George R.R. Martin’s series of epic fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-), showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have managed, on the whole, to satisfy both fans of the books and audiences unfamiliar with Martin’s works.  Yet this season marks a significant shift in the adaptation process, one that has the potential to challenge many traditional notions of fidelity criticism.  Despite starting to write the first volume in 1991, George R.R. Martin is still in the process of writing the book series, and this season looks to be the transitional moment when the show will start to overtake the books.  In this short article, therefore, I would like to consider what happens to fidelity criticism when a show goes beyond the published material and starts to “adapt” material that has been planned but not yet written by the original author.

In the fifteen years since Robert Stam published his influential critique of fidelity criticism, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” the academic study of adaptation has attempted to move away from discourses of fidelity that privilege the “original” source above the adaptation, to embrace instead an alternative intertextual model of “texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation and transmutation, with no clear point of origin.”  While there have been some attempts to reclaim and rehabilitate fidelity criticism (e.g. MacCabe et al, True to the Spirit, 2012), there is still a prevailing assumption that notions of fidelity reinforce a problematic hierarchy between source and adaptation, where the novel is valued above its screen adaptation.  Yet, as Christine Geraghty has noted, while we may wish to move beyond fidelity criticism in our own textual analysis, the question of faithfulness is nevertheless still important in studies of reception, given that “faithfulness matters if it matters to the viewer.”

As we might expect, the fandom surrounding Game of Thrones is heavily invested in issues of faithfulness, although it should be noted that the forums primarily devoted to the TV show, such as Winter is Coming and Watchers on the Wall, tend to be more open to changes than those that predated the show, such as A Forum of Ice and Fire.  One of the difficulties of this particular adaptation was that George R.R. Martin had deliberately conceived of the book series as something that would only be achievable in the literary form.  After having worked for ten years in Hollywood as a writer and producer on shows such as The Twilight Zone (1985-1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1987-1990), Martin made the conscious decision to return to prose fiction to escape the restrictions of a TV budget and shooting schedule.  In this age of media convergence, serialized television may be becoming more novelistic in its form, yet it is nevertheless still the case that there are significant differences in what each medium can achieve.  Certainly, by constructing an epic fantasy world with over a thousand named characters, 31 of whom are given their own point-of-view chapters, Martin’s book series posed a serious challenge for anyone who wished to adapt it to the screen.

Most of the changes made by the showrunners to date have been relatively small, such as amalgamating some minor characters, cutting out much of the historical background, aging up the central protagonists, and adding extra scenes to provide insight into characters — such as Tywin Lannister, Margaery Tyrell and Robb Stark — who were never given a POV chapter in the novels.  The upcoming season, on the other hand, looks to be making substantial changes.  While the showrunners found two seasons’ worth of material to adapt from the plot-heavy third book (A Storm of Swords), they have elected to adapt the slower-paced fourth (A Feast for Crows) and fifth (A Dance with Dragons) books together in a single season, with entire storylines dropped and others moving in a markedly different direction from their book counterparts.  Furthermore, as some characters are progressing more quickly through their book material than others, it is looking likely that this season will introduce elements from the sixth book (The Winds of Winter), even though Martin is still writing it.

This has become a point of concern for many fans, and while there is some debate as to whether the sixth book will be published ahead of season six in 2016, it is clear that the series will conclude well before Martin publishes the planned seventh and final novel, A Dream of Spring.  In 2013, the showrunners held a weeklong meeting in Santa Fe with Martin to discuss in detail his plans for the overall structure of the story, and it is evident that seasons six and seven of the show will be adapting these plans for the books that have not yet been written. [2]

This form of concurrent production has a number of implications for the debates surrounding the faithfulness of the Game of Thrones series to the books.  Most importantly, the distinction between the book series as the “original” source text and the TV show as the “adaptation” becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.  With the show overtaking the book series, television will not only be the first medium through which the majority of fans will discover the events of the final novel, but it will also have been written, shot and screened well before Martin finishes writing the novel.  To a certain extent, this final novel therefore has the potential to be received by some fans more like a novelization that adapts the events of the TV series than as the “original” source.  Of course, Martin’s status as the creator of the book series [3] means that A Dream of Spring will be treated as more than a “mere” novelization, but nevertheless we are confronted here with an increasingly blurred distinction between original and copy.

Moreover, the anxieties surrounding spoilers will shift focus.  Until now, the concern has been about book readers potentially spoiling events for show watchers, but it will now be show watchers who will be first to find out what happens.  In an age of social media, it will be challenging for any readers who wish to avoid the show revelations and remain “unsullied” until the novels’ release.  Indeed, this process has already begun, with any changes made by the showrunners provoking fevered speculation on forums about what this may mean for the future books.  The choice to remove certain storylines and characters from the show is treated as an inadvertent spoiler, alerting viewers that these story arcs will turn out to be relatively insignificant within the future novels.

Of course, the fact that both the novels and show are still in process means that this dynamic may change over time.  Martin’s original outline for the book series was recently revealed, showing that he had initially intended for the series to be a trilogy with a markedly different structure and focus.  Within that letter to his publisher, he admits that, “As you know, I don’t outline my novels.  I find that if I know exactly where a book is going, I lose all interest in writing it.”  We may find therefore that the book series will ultimately diverge from the outlines planned by Martin alongside the showrunners in 2013.  It is telling that in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Martin teased that he has recently come up with a shocking new twist to the novels that they can’t do on the show because they have “made a couple [of] decisions that will preclude it.”  The showrunners may face pressure from the fans to stay relatively faithful to the plans for the novels, but as the storylines start to diverge, Martin seems less concerned with restricting himself to staying faithful to those earlier plans.  We are moving to a situation in which we have two parallel adaptations, both based on but not beholden to those outlines laid out in that weeklong meeting in Santa Fe.  Notions of fidelity may still play a role in the reception of Game of Thrones, yet it is not so clear what the “original” text is to which the showrunners are being asked to be faithful.

To conclude, therefore, I’d like to put forward a few questions that this case study raises: 1) To what extent do notions of faithfulness still matter when the source itself is under development?  2) How will fans respond to differences between the ending of the show and the ending of the novels, especially if they experience the show first?  3) How are our ideas of the “original” and the “copy” challenged in these rare cases of concurrent production?  While this has only been a short mapping out of these issues ahead of the premiere on Sunday, I hope that future scholarship explores the wider implications that this fascinating case study may have for issues of fidelity criticism and adaptation in an age of convergence.

Notes

[1] Although unfortunately not here in the UK, where Sky Atlantic has elected to premiere the episode on Monday evening instead.

[2] This situation is reminiscent of the collaboration between Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where they collaborated on the screenplay together, then went off to work on their respective novel and film concurrently.  Both deviated from the early drafts of the screenplay, and the resultant works contained many similar elements but were substantially different in tone and content.

[3] Martin’s active involvement with the TV production, having written an episode each for seasons one to four, further complicates this dynamic.

The media industry mantra “Content is king” once reflected the legacy industry’s power to dictate terms of media consumption through oligopolistic distribution and pricing. But technological change has undermined content control, and so at last many in the media industry are acknowledging a new ruler: the audience. Fortunately, the audience has an insatiable demand for content. Hurrah: long live content the king!

I saw this shift in industry discourse first hand at the 2012 and 2014 Time Warner’s Thought Leadership Faculty Seminars. As I previously reported, presenters in the July 2012 seminar insisted that TW was committed to “bolstering the ecosystem,” that is, the old business models. I saw presentations on the evils of “piracy” and the importance of physical media (DVDs), and I heard confident predictions that time-shifting millennials will enjoy linear viewing and commercial interruptions once they get a bit older.

TW executives toed a different line in July 2014. Opening the seminar, the Warner Bros. Senior Advisor of Media Research explained that TW executives are kept awake at night worrying about how “to protect our assets” from the “volatility of the media ecosystem.” Rather than sustain the “status quo” (translation: fight a rear guard action against change), TW must adapt to the “disruptive forces that challenge our business models.” Within the past decade TW has shrunk from a behemoth conglomerate to only three companies: HBO, Turner, and Warner Bros. Reducing its dependence on advertising revenues by spinning off Time Magazines and AOL, TW is now a “pure content play,” which will, executives claim, continue to thrive however distribution platforms evolve. HBO, as one of these executives baldly announced, plans to “feed the addiction” for its content. HBO’s recent deal with Amazon may indicate it is studying Amazon’s strategies for building consumer dependency.

When asked about the threat of piracy, the HBO executive neatly “pivoted” to piracy’s value as a form of market research: “Our learnings are that hits drive pirating behavior; hits attract pirates; and if we can convert pirates to paying customers, maybe one in ten, that will add up to real dollars.”  Another TW executive described a new “consumer friendly” approach to handling unauthorized access to content. “We want to give consumers easier access,” she explained, because “that’s where innovation is going on.” So TW is “piloting in the sand, not in concrete, because the world is changing.” TW wants to be flexible enough to follow consumers wherever they go (although the metaphor of sand seems an unfortunate one).

Though they conceded that young viewers timeshift, TW executives still insisted on the primacy of scheduled linear viewing, pointing to the “water cooler” value of Game of Thrones episodes. The HBO executive noted that social media chatter spikes when an episode is first released, then trails off. To “manage this conversation” and “keep subscribers engaged over time,” HBO simply has “too much investment in shows to release all episodes at once,” Netflix-style. HBO’s subscription strategy depends on an artificial scarcity of episodes (“We want to retain subscribers”), possibly because HBO is still dependent on MSOs to deliver their customers. Recently, however, TW CEO Jeff Bewkes has openly noted that HBO is trying to become more like Netflix, not the other way around, indicating a possible shift away from the strategy of content withholding.

A CW executive explained the changing economics of television advertising. In 2012, TW executives insisted that online (“digital”) episodes should have the same ad load as linear TV. Advertisers, however, were reluctant to pay for online viewership without the demographic data Nielsen supplies for linear viewership. In 2014, knowing the majority of its young audience timeshifted on digital platforms, the CW partnered Nielsen and Doubleclick data to prove that at least half of their digital viewers were the targeted 18-34 year olds. By offering to charge advertisers only for the 18-34 year olds (in other words, providing a 50% discount), the CW was able to sell more ads, doubling the ad load per episode, and thus to come out even. The CW also offered advertisers more buying flexibility. Most networks force advertisers who want to buy time on a top-rated program to buy time also on a lower-rated one; the CW allowed advertisers to buy only on the programs they wanted. The CW executive noted, however, that viewing and click-through metrics for digital commercials seemed to have much more to do with the quality of the commercial “creative” (the ad idea and execution) than with the quality of the program interrupted by that commercial. All these changes favor the advertiser, not the audience: eschewing policies such as YouTube’s True View, in which audiences may skip a commercial, the CW, like most of the rest of the television industry, continues to search for the holy grail: a technology that makes everybody watch the commercials.

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, once the revenue powerhouse driving DVD sales, is now focusing on how to take TW film and TV content and “monetize it downstream.” Noting that physical media is a dying market, a Home Entertainment executive explained the new strategy of “electronic sell through.” In 2012, WB promoted Ultraviolet, a difficult-to-use digital service; in 2014, WB is simplifying consumer sharing experiences (although the “legal team is nervous”) and experimenting with social media, online communities of fans (WB A-list), and “long tail” content (WB Archive Instant has “rabid fans”).

Although the Time Warner Thought Leadership Faculty Seminar is designed by its media research executives, and so reflects only one company’s views, I recommend that scholars interested in learning more about the changing media industries attend these free events. Unlike trade press articles or industry conferences, they allow us to ask questions directly of industry executives, who likewise may benefit from hearing our perspectives. The 2014 seminar ended with TW executives making a plea for collaborative research with academics: as one executive put it, professors can research “longer term future ideas” that TW can’t get to because they “have to deal with today.” Whether or not we choose to collaborate with TW, this two-day seminar can teach us a lot about how such a legacy media conglomerate is hoping to transform disruption into “opportunity.”

1. Low-budget horror film The Purge is expected to come away with a $35 million opening weekend, more than ten times the film’s production budget of $3 million. The Purge grossed $17 million on Friday and was #1 at the box office this weekend. Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing opened strong as well, grossing more than any limited release since The Place Beyond the Pines.  Much Ado About Nothing is one of several recent films, including Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha and Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, shot in black-and-white.

2. News reports this week have revealed that the U.S.’s National Security Agency has been data mining from major internet and social media companies, in addition to monitoring Verizon phone records of U.S. citizens. So far, nine media companies are alleged to have cooperated in the PRISM program: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. Many have denied having any knowledge of PRISM .

3. AT&T joins DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, Guggenheim Partners, Yahoo and a handful of other entities as potential bidders for ownership of Hulu. Reports suggest that AT&T may join with former News Corp. head Peter Chernin’s Chernin Group to purchase the company together. Bids for Hulu have reportedly ranged from $500 million to $1 billion depending on stipulations regarding content deals with the present owners of the company, Disney/ABC and News Corp.

4. A company named MiKandi produced the first pornographic app designed for Google Glass. Google responded by banning pornographic apps, defined by the company as “Glassware content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts or sexually explicit material.” On a related note, fearing that the head-mounted display technology would enable cheating and card-counting, New Jersey casinos have banned the use of Google Glass. Somewhat ironically, use of Google Glass was also restricted from a recent Google shareholders meeting.

5. A new study by the Council for Research Excellence and financed by Nielsen reveals that online streaming services like Netflix and Hulu provide the majority of mobile television consumption on smartphones and tablets. Netflix and Hulu accounted for 64% of TV watched on smartphones and 54% on tablets, while broadcast and cable network’s websites or online applications accounted for only 26% of mobile TV watching.

6. On June 6^th, American film actress Esther Williams passed away at the age of 91 in Beverly Hills. Williams was a competitive swimmer who became a MGM contract star in the 1940s. According to The New York Times, Williams was one of the top 10 box-office Hollywood stars in 1949 and 1950. Her films at MGM often involved spectacular swimming sequences, many choreographed by Busby Berkeley.

7. At Cannes, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adele – chapitre 1 & 2) won the Palme D’Or by a unanimous vote from a jury headed by Steven Spielberg. Though critics have generally responded favorably to the film, some prominent voices have criticized the film’s graphic sex scenes for reproducing, or being constructed according to, a hetero-normative male gaze. Manohla Dargis and Julie Maroh, author of the graphic novel on which the film is based, have both voiced opposition to the film’s sexual representation of the lesbian couple.

8. The penultimate episode of season 3 of Game of Thrones, “Rains of Castamere,” shocked fans and resulted in a flurry of press about the episode’s graphic violence. Popular news outlets weighed in on the episode as one of the most violent in TV history. Author George Martin explained his reasoning behind writing the “Red Wedding” chapter in interviews.

9. Amazon Studios announced that they would produce five original series available exclusively on Amazon Prime. These include, ‘Alpha House,’ a political satire created by Garry Trudeau, starring John Goodman, and ‘Betas,’ a comedy about “young entrepreneurs attempting to make it big in techland.”

10. In Netflix-related news, the trailer for Netflix’s newest original series, ‘Orange is the New Black,’ is now available online. The series, which is about a bourgeois Brooklyn woman’s stint in a female prison, will debut on July 11 with all 13 episodes available to stream. Netflix also recently did not renew their licensing agreement with Viacom, leaving Netflix subscribers bereft of kid-friendly programs like ‘Dora the Explorer’ and ‘Spongebob Squarepants.’  In response, Amazon struck a licensing deal with Viacom for Prime Instant Video. In addition to the kid-friendly fare, Amazon also plans to make available other Viacom titles like ‘Workaholics’ and MTV’s ‘Awkward’ on Instant.

Acknowledging, of course, that matters of scale would keep this franchise a far less lucrative merchandising opportunity, the fantasy genre (and Sean Bean’s intertextual appeal across the two franchises) does elicit certain comparisons. A recent deal with Dark Horse Comics might sound fairly familiar to those who have read Kristin Thompson’s detailed study of the franchising process surrounding The Lord of the Rings, given that it includes both high-end merchandise (like character statues, character busts or prop weaponry) as well as more commercial forms of licensed materials (like the pictured coasters or trading cards, which fans took up as a [spoiler-filled] hashtag in the wake of the announcement). While the latter may appear on a comic book store’s counter, the former appeal to more “hardcore” fans that desire “official” merchandise of a high quality and value authenticity.

Authenticity is a key term here, given that HBO is clearly invested in questions of quality as it relates to their programming. In fact, the licensing process for the series seems to me to be a question of balancing a level of control over the quality of products related to the series and an effort to both monetize and expand their audience (and thus their subscription base). Before the first season began, they maintained tight control over licensed products, releasing a small collection of t-shirts and other merchandise to their online HBO Store (and its New York City retail location).

However, as the season unfolded, they continually added more merchandise, including a number of t-shirts that immortalized particular quotes from the series. These were often off-handed references rather than key moments (like this “I Made The Eight!” t-shirt that many casual viewers might not even recognize as a line from the series), but they offered an immediate and, more interestingly, serialized form of licensing that would keep fans visiting the site on a weekly basis. The store has grown to nearly 150 items since the first items – two t-shirts bearing logos for the series – appeared in December of last year, and it is the first series-specific store listed on the sidebar of the HBO Store website (above the similarly lucrative, and more highly rated, True Blood).

Now that they are expanding their licensing agreements, however, they are handing over more control to independent companies in the buildup to the second season. In the case of the upcoming video game release developed by Cyanide Studios and published by Atlus for XBox 360, PS3 and PC, however, they are handing over more control than they would like. The video game rights to Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series were sold separately from the TV rights, which meant that HBO found themselves with a lucrative licensing opportunity that someone else controlled. A compromise has led to a branded game that will bear the likenesses and voices of actors from the series but remain in the hands of Cyanide, although HBO made efforts to acquire the gaming rights outright before settling on this arrangement.

However, while HBO intends on promoting the game (which will be released around the time of the second season premiere, alongside the Dark Horse merchandise and the Season One DVD/Blu-Ray release), this foray into licensed games moves them further away from the discourses of quality that drive their brand identity. Generally considered to be rushed titles designed as promotional tools as opposed to satisfying gaming experiences, licensed titles are fairly maligned within the gaming community, and the relatively little information available about this title before its release does little to suggest this will break that particular trend (although that George R.R. Martin was involved in the game’s story could engender some goodwill among fans).

This is not the first licensed game based on a fictional HBO series, as The Sopranos: Road to Respect debuted in 2006, but that (poorly reviewed) game was an effort to monetize a long-running property towards the end of its run. By comparison, the Game of Thrones game comes at a crucial juncture for the series, and will be part of a major marketing push designed to transform the franchise from a cult hit into a mainstream phenomenon. However, if corners are cut in terms of quality in the midst of aiming for this transformation, it is possible that licensing could complicate the quality TV discourses that HBO stakes its brand on (and which earned the series two Primetime Emmy awards and a nomination in Outstanding Drama Series), and could also frustrate the same fans who have responded so positively to HBO’s merchandising efforts to this point (including, as I’ve written about elsewhere, the pre-air transmedia experience campaign organized by Campfire).

The former point raises larger questions about HBO’s relationship with genre franchising that this post doesn’t have time to address. However, regarding the latter point, the economic realities of the series’ production have been highly visible within fan discussion, as the substantial cost of production raises serious questions of the series’ longevity (especially given the length of subsequent volumes, which would push an adaptation of even just the existing books to 6+ seasons). Fans know that licensing opportunities like this are an important space where additional seasons could be rendered financially viable, and thus might embrace a mediocre licensed title or a cheesy fridge magnet if it means HBO has the potential to continue adapting the series for years to come.