ABSTRACT
Of HBO’s current stable, Game of Thrones arguably inspires the most drastically varied responses. For example, at the same time that the show received a slew of Emmy nominations and wins for its fifth season, its showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were lambasted online both for the ill-conceived staging of Sansa Stark’s rape scene and for their fumbled response to understandable critiques of that sequence. While the diegetic narrative of the show charged along at a refreshingly breathless pace, an equally compelling parallel commentary narrative was hurriedly published online or recorded to podcast by countless re-cappers across the United States and the world at large. Game of Thrones recaps range in tone from critical to popular, from po-faced reverence to good-natured mocking and have the potential to expand the already massive world of Westeros, Essos and beyond. They can lend the show a much-needed self-conscious and jovial meta-narrative, which Game of Thrones, with its rock-solid sense of telefantasy ‘realism’ and a coherent ‘hyperdiegisis’ could not possess in-programme. This recap culture, Lynch argues, consists of avid readers, listeners and viewers exchanging deeper canonical insights and speculations, thus confirming the solid Quality/cult world HBO has worked hard to establish. Drawing on theories of cult media and fan reception, Lynch discusses the impact that key podcasts (the discontinued Grantland’s Watch the Thrones, its successor segment on Channel 33’s The Watch and The Vulture TV Podcast) and online-published recaps (The AV Club’s ‘newbies’ and ‘experts’ discussions, Jezebel’s Game of Boners and others) have on Game of Thrones’ reception as a television text, sometimes supporting, but also sometimes undermining HBO’s own ideas about their programmes’ prestige significance and how such programmes can and should be discussed in popular and critical discourse.
