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Another Weekend, Another Tale of Woe for Tentpoles.....


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Nudity and sex in a show like Game Of Thrones is fine, in the sense that consenting adults can do and watch what they please.

 

But I sure hope no one tries to tell me the nudity and sex is there for any other reason than to, "sell tickets." That's what it's in the show for, and I'm sure it's quite effective.

 

The producers could remove it from the show, and then watch the ratings plummet, so they are not going to be doing that anytime soon.

 

I'm sure most of you know the definition of the word: prurient.

 

And why a Greek sculpture of a naked woman, is very different from what they do on Game Of Thrones.

 

R,

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The producers could remove it from the show, and then watch the ratings plummet, so they are not going to be doing that anytime soon.

 

R,

 

This I don't really agree with. The entirety of Season 6 had little sex. In fact, I don't recall any real sex scenes in the entire season. Didn't stop it from being one of the most watched seasons. It's also no coincidence that the highest rated episodes are usually less sex-based.

 

Bottom line, while GoT has some sex in it, it is not a rampant as many want to think. I watch it because it's entertaining in terms of story, and I want to know what happens to the characters. Has nothing to do with sex. It has sex in it because it's HBO - and an HBO series without sex would be like Disneyland abandoning Micky Mouse.

Edited by Landon D. Parks
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Here's the counter question Satsuki.....if Game of Thrones is all the things you say it is, then why does it need any nudity or sex at all? After all, it's so well made and written, and appeals to such an intellectual crowd, seems it would not need to rely on nudity and sex scenes. The sexual content is in the show for a reason, why?

 

Well, clearly the show runners don't have enough confidence in their material to go without. The show's use of gratuitous sex (from a narrative perspective) has even been dubbed 'sexposition' by some fans. And clearly, part of the audience is just there to see boobs and to see who dies next. I suspect the show runners think it's the price they have to pay in order to keep their popularity up, which in turn allows them to keep making new episodes. Those episodes ain't cheap to produce.

 

Though I'm not opposed to sexy-times from a purely prurient point of view, I don't think it's necessary either. But then again, this is coming from someone who read the books years before the series was given the green light. So the story never needed boobs to hold my interest.

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This I don't really agree with. The entirety of Season 6 had little sex. In fact, I don't recall any real sex scenes in the entire season. Didn't stop it from being one of the most watched seasons. It's also no coincidence that the highest rated episodes are usually less sex-based.

 

Bottom line, while GoT has some sex in it, it is not a rampant as many want to think. I watch it because it's entertaining in terms of story, and I want to know what happens to the characters. Has nothing to do with sex. It has sex in it because it's HBO - and an HBO series without sex would be like Disneyland abandoning Micky Mouse.

 

 

I agree with Landon, the show does not have as much sex and nudity as it did in early seasons, now that the complex plot is charging along and so many set-ups are starting to pay-off, making it harder to fit in such diversions within the broadcast time limits.

 

This last season was excellent, particularly the last two episodes -- some of the best directing I've ever seen, period.

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Well, clearly the show runners don't have enough confidence in their material to go without. The show's use of gratuitous sex (from a narrative perspective) has even been dubbed 'sexposition' by some fans. And clearly, part of the audience is just there to see boobs and to see who dies next. I suspect the show runners think it's the price they have to pay in order to keep their popularity up, which in turn allows them to keep making new episodes. Those episodes ain't cheap to produce.

 

Though I'm not opposed to sexy-times from a purely prurient point of view, I don't think it's necessary either. But then again, this is coming from someone who read the books years before the series was given the green light. So the story never needed boobs to hold my interest.

 

Okaaaaaaay, so you knew all this already. Especially.....

 

"Well, clearly the show runners don't have enough confidence in their material to go without."

 

100% correct.

 

The sexual content is a big money maker, not going away anytime soon.

 

R,

 

 

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It has sex in it because it's HBO - and an HBO series without sex would be like Disneyland abandoning Micky Mouse.

 

Right, making money from soft porn, that's what I said.

 

I'm not making a morals based judgement here. We just need to call a spade a spade, this is a soft porn show, end of story.

 

R,

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Right, making money from soft porn, that's what I said.

 

I'm not making a morals based judgement here. We just need to call a spade a spade, this is a soft porn show, end of story.

 

R,

 

 

Sounds entirely like a morals based judgement... simply because the label of "porn" has a lot of baggage attached to it. "Conan the Barbarian" has some sex in it, even an orgy scene, but it doesn't get filed on a shelf under the title "Soft Porn" instead of "Action/Adventure/Fantasy". Some of these shows are the equivalent of an R-rated movie not meant for children to watch. Ten hours of programming a season (and six seasons to date) of which a few minutes has sex in it hardly means that it can be reduced to being called a "soft porn show, end of story". Because if this were a soft porn show, they would devote more of their running time to the sex! Because if someone sat down hoping to watch ten hours of soft porn and ended up seeing mostly anything but that, they'd want their money back, they'd scream false advertising.

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Okaaaaaaay, so you knew all this already.

 

My point being, I don't think T&A is the source of the show's success. A lot of shows, especially on premium cable, have gratuitous sex and violence. Most of them don't manage to keep their audiences' strong interest for six seasons or more.

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Here's the counter question Satsuki.....if Game of Thrones is all the things you say it is, then why does it need any nudity or sex at all? After all, it's so well made and written, and appeals to such an intellectual crowd, seems it would not need to rely on nudity and sex scenes. The sexual content is in the show for a reason, why?

 

R,

 

I know this question was directed at Satsuki, and also I haven't seen Game of Thrones, but I did see both seasons of Rome, and was perplexed by the nudity and sex scenes. They really didn't serve any purpose, unless it was to rope in pre-teen boys and teenage boys alike.

 

I think if you're injecting nudity or sex to grab an audience, then, in my opinion, you might not have much of a show in the first place. I thought Rome was interesting, but in my book it wasn't the award winning piece of high-art that a lot of people said it was.

 

Way back in 2005 I wrote a pilot and several treatments for a medieval series regarding an English knight doing the king's bidding in the late 1100s. It was part of a competition on who would watch what show. There were a lot of young writers with a ton of reality concepts. But I won :) My inspiration was from the old Cadfael BBC TV series that aired on PBS's Mystery series. I thought it was one of the coolest shows around, and wouldn't it be nice to look at another character from roughly that same period (maybe 50 years on). In fact a couple of young producer types tried to pitch my idea as a career move. Oh well. Nothing ever came of that.

 

Getting back to the topic; tent-poles try to appeal to everyone, but in the end appeal to no one save those who want to strap in like a roller coaster and just go for a ride. But I think at some point you saturate the market with "high concept" stuff like John Carter of Mars or Avengers or Supes-verse-Bats or what have you.

 

So much that people will eventually fall off and want to see something different. That's a big gamble for a corporate owned studio.

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Right, making money from soft porn, that's what I said.

 

I'm not making a morals based judgement here. We just need to call a spade a spade, this is a soft porn show, end of story.

 

R

 

So you consider any film with a sex scene in it to be soft porn, then?

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Wow, we've got some prudes on here!

 

Game of Thrones may have some sex and nudity in it, but I'd hardly call it 'gratuitous'. There are certainly shows out there that use sex scenes gratuitously and to no purpose, but GoT isn't one of them.

 

Personally, I find it far more disturbing the level of acceptance that gratuitous violence on our screens has, yet people will still get more worked up about a boob or two.

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Wow, we've got some prudes on here!

 

Well, just Richard.

 

But then I find cute dogs and anodyne, shiny teethed parents a bit gratuitous, so maybe it's all OK. Whatever sells tickets, right? :)

 

 

Personally, I find it far more disturbing the level of acceptance that gratuitous violence on our screens has, yet people will still get more worked up about a boob or two.

 

Well yeah, boobs are lovely, natural things. Far nicer than being eaten by dogs or burning young children alive etc..

 

Don't get me wrong, I love Game of Thrones, but I do catch myself cheering on the brutal dispatch of some villain who thoroughly deserves it.. until I remember that vengeance and violence are the same urges that drive so much of what's wrong with humans. Of course it's only fantasy, but it does feed our baser instincts sometimes.

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Am I the only person turned off by GoT because of the medieval setting itself? Nudity isn't the reason it is critically acclaimed but I would never rule out that as a reason for the show's initial spark of success.

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I think this is an issue of nationality.

 

The US seems to be extremely puritanical about sex, foul language and drugs, but extremely permissive about violence, in a way that can surprise the rest of the world.

 

P

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My point is simply that Game of Thrones uses soft porn for commercial purposes. I don't think that's a difficult point to understand or accept.

 

R,

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My point is simply that Game of Thrones uses soft porn for commercial purposes. I don't think that's a difficult point to understand or accept.

 

R,

How do you know they use what you call "soft porn" for commercial purposes? Basically what you are saying is that the only way you can explain usage of nudity and sex in series is through financial motives, which I don't know why it would be true. Why can't it be creative decision?

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How do you know they use what you call "soft porn" for commercial purposes? Basically what you are saying is that the only way you can explain usage of nudity and sex in series is through financial motives, which I don't know why it would be true. Why can't it be creative decision?

It's just really rare that nudity is a creative decision with big budget things.

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I think with big budget things every element (not just nudity) of the concept is evaluated for the profitability. But I think such concepts don't always start with the idea of the profit, but can be based on creative thoughts and what would be genuinely best for the movie/series (depending on the studio. HBO is definitely one that tries to produce quality stuff).

 

So the process can be: 1.) creative concept based on decisions that are not financially motivated 2.) evaluation whether that concept is profitable

 

In which case the origin of the idea is a creative decision. Financial decision is only whether that idea gets a green light.

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Well, of course in commercial filmmaking having some nudity and sex can be a marketing decision, just as having an action sequence can be! Hopefully the writer can find a way of making all of those things advance the narrative or the characterizations in some useful way. But movies are full of things that help sell themselves -- beauty, sex, violence, scenery, etc.

 

But the question is whether all depictions of sex are porn, soft or hardcore. I don't think so -- but I admit that when it begins to get extreme enough and seems to only exist for its own sake, it's a fuzzy line. The old quote by judge Potter Stewart is worth remembering:

 

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

 

And in this court case, the "pornography" under attack was a French movie by Louis Malle called "Les Amants".

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And in this court case, the "pornography" under attack was a French movie by Louis Malle called "Les Amants".

 

Seriously, what was the difference between, Blue is the Warmest Colour, and a porno flick?

 

R,

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Seriously, what was the difference between, Blue is the Warmest Colour, and a porno flick?

 

R,

Haha. In terms of the sex scenes, not much. They were overlit and completely unbelievable in their staging. But the actual film was surprisingly good.

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Am I the only person turned off by GoT because of the medieval setting itself? Nudity isn't the reason it is critically acclaimed but I would never rule out that as a reason for the show's initial spark of success.

 

I don't think you are, but I and millions of other men who grew up during the D&D expansion years in the 70s and 80s, had been waiting to see Hollywood splurge on some period pieces other than westerns.

 

It's a genre that's been long dormant. Japan actually has not just a film genre dedicated to their medieval period, but also used to crank out whole TV series as well, explain the history and even the tactics the generals used in massive battles. For some reason Europe and America has only recently caught on.

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