In season two of The White Lotus, young assistant Portia complains that she wanted to go to Italy to get away from “the discourse.” Sometimes, when I watch a new show, I feel her words acutely. Criticism is a weird business because although it is informed by experience, it is ultimately just professionalized opinion-having and opinion-giving. Most of us have seen the same foundational shows; lots of critics seemed to have come to the business after growing up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as I did). But critics can still look at the same thing and want more from it and less and/or see something others have missed. At a base level, this is why the whole Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator system works; the hope is that perhaps by averaging all our critical commentary together we can provide some sort of answer to the age-old “stream it or skip it” question. It’s probably easier to interpret a score far on the edges of the spectrum, but what happens when most people think a show is… fine?
When Netflix released the first season of Shadow and Bone, another addition to the many YA fantasy novel series adaptations, critics thought: “not quite the next Game of Thrones,” “a muddled, joyless checklist of fantasy tropes,” “Tsar-tlingly Bingeable,” “Sets Itself Apart from the YA Pack with Welcome Restraint,” and “Fantasy Tropes Done Right.” That’s a broad arc of critical response, ranging from my least favorite kind of essay (why isn’t this thing like this other thing) to a middling review (this is easy to watch quickly) to basically a rave (the word “blissful” is thrown around). I’ve seen the show twice, and I suppose I’d land somewhere in the upper middle range. I found it enjoyable and absorbing, with a unique set of consciously adopted influences, but also some shakier elements. What these reviews reveal most clearly is the high expectations the discourse has placed on any new fantasy show must contend with if it attempts to enter the streaming fray.
Long gone are the days when you could run a monster-of-the-week fantasy procedural like Xena or Lost Girl on the Syfy channel, content to be trope-soaked but offering genuine fun and feelings. The special effects could be hokey, but the writers knew their characters inside and out and knew how to write 70 episodes that were far more hit than miss, so somehow you stopped noticing. I’ve talked at length about how strange the cultural shift was between the release of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the release of Game of Thrones a few years later. GOT brought fantasy to television and made it gritty, sexy, and nihilistic. Its popularity cannot be overstated. It cemented HBO as thee streaming service for prestige television and other streaming services who aspire to that crown (or just a piece of the pie) have been striving to find their own versions ever since. Imitators have been many, Starz’s Outlander and adaptations of The Cousins’ War, History Channel’s Vikings, HBO’s self-imitation House of the Dragon. There’s a darkness to these and others, a tonal shift from the fantasy I used to watch pre-Thrones. Although each has their own story and way of telling it, the obsessive focus is on the ruthless politicking. And honestly, it’s just not that much fun to watch.
High fantasy can be dark, political, thoughtful, chilling, silly, sweet, moving and many more besides. It can, basically, share the best qualities of any other genre, but one thing I think it must have is some human fun with the story it’s telling. When representing a fantasy world (or a fantasy version of history) you have to make your viewers believe in a complete world. And in any world, even one ravaged by wars or riven by racial tensions or literally split in half by dark magic, there are jokes and songs and silly laughs and people living their daily lives. As it went on, Thrones got worse and worse at depicting this; what the average person (or even a queen) did on a daily basis just stopped mattering to the writers. Everyone was always living in the grimmest and most heightened version of their reality, and I think much of the richness of showing us a world unlike our own bled away across the seasons. After GOT so spectacularly botched its final seasons and descended into serious self-parody, I started to see some other kinds of fantasy shows getting greenlit, most notably The Witcher, and more recently, Shadow and Bone.
Both The Witcher and Shadow and Bone approach their worldbuilding with both gravitas and humor. Characters fight big slithery monsters; characters drink in taverns. Characters are forced to execute a murderous princess; characters befriend a bard who won’t stop making up songs about them. Characters lose friends in a wintery ambush; characters engage in a museum heist. There’s a generosity to these worlds; a sense that people can be driven by many motivations, rather than just dedicate their entire existence to revenge or avarice or the Lord of Light. Shadow and Bone is emphatically not the next Game of Thrones, but it shouldn’t have to be.
Haunting this conversation is The Rings of Power, which I think it the best recent example of high fantasy, and one that successfully blends darkness and light. That is a better show than Shadow and Bone, more inventive and better written (and with like 100 times the budget, but who’s counting?). Shadow and Bone has problems, although I find them easy to overlook, to lay back and enjoy it all as it were. I have some questions about how old everyone is supposed to be (the love triangle’s creepiness level heavily depends on the answer), and some storylines are very underdeveloped (a montage is still not character development).
Far and away the main point of criticism everyone throws at both Witcher and Shadow and Bone is the unoriginality of its plot points. Well, yes. But originality is not always quality (Mother!) and although originality in storytelling is a quality to be admired, it does not necessarily have to follow that it is an indispensable one. Nor does is follow that originality will guarantee audience acceptance (1899). Genre is built upon the skillful use of established tropes and complaining that you now have another show that uses those tropes to great effect feels a bit like complaining there’s too many pasta dishes at an Italian feast. So I don’t know guys, maybe we should just grab a bowl of bolognese and let ourselves get lost in a new world, one with humor and hope living side by side with darkness and despair.