This article originally appeared in Dinner Party, an evening newsletter about everything that just happened. Sign up here to get it every weeknight.
Okay, so many folks who were watching the Game of Dragons show this past Sunday are complaining about not being able to see two members of the same family get it on. The screen was so dark, they said, they couldn’t see the looks of pure elation on the face of a niece smashing cheeks with her uncle amid crashing waves on a scenic beach. That’s right, the practice that disgusts us, that repels some from watching the show altogether, is what its viewers want to see the most.
There’s irony there but also a critique. Why was this episode so dark? Vulture critic (and friend of Dinner Party) Kathryn VanArendonk, among the chorus of those who were not feeling the shadowy affair, theorized that this happened because of a day-for-night production that led to an intentional darkening in post. She writes that it looked so bad for three key reasons. I would like to add a fourth reason why this episode is so dark and also why we’re so upset about it being so dark: The majority of us are watching it at the wrong time of day. House of Da Dragons is, quite simply, a morning-time banger.
Now I’m biased, obviously, as I think everything that I do is the superior way of doing things, but I decided against checking in on this show the moment it drops. (I’m also not among those certified, legitimate, serious TV critics who receive screeners ahead of time, so there’s that too.) Instead, I choose to catch it Monday (or in the case of this week, Tuesday) mornings with a piping-hot vanilla latte. I don’t know much about TV settings except that they’re usually garbage without tinkering with the bleeps and the bloops, but I’ll tell you that I do have an adjustable hue light next to my decade-old smart TV that I usually brighten to the max so the screen can respond in kind.
So why is this different from the nighttime? I’m very glad I asked. Watching this show when it airs usually means a couple things: (a) The home is dark, so our TVs can’t find additional light to adjust to (TVs usually darken as to not be too intense on the eyes), and (b) everyone else is watching the show, and like GoT before it (if to a lesser degree), it’s still very easy to slip into watching Twitter for live reacts to the episode. I’m not saying that critics succumb to the distractions — it’s literally our jobs not to, and many have watched in advance anyway — but that doesn’t mean we’re above our impulses. I think the morning time sorta implies a quieter setting and less of a need to be privy to what the rest of the world is thinking.
So, yeah, I’d recommend a little bacon-egg-and-cheese with your incest and a couple of lighting adjustments in lieu of, ya know, the production getting it TF together on its end. HBO is coming under fire now, but it’s not like it’s alone. So many shows look like they’ve been shot during an eclipse, we’ve had to not just adapt our TV settings but our expectations. That doesn’t mean that the critique isn’t worthy — if a TV show can’t be seen on an actual TV in 2022, that’s a real fucking problem. But it doesn’t mean that our viewing habits haven’t also changed. That, yes, we are more distracted than ever, which means we might have to bake in periods during our week — what previous generations once called leisure time — to check out our favorite shit, uninterrupted. Unfortunately, it’s hard to do that because all the great shows are centered around the workweek. It’s 2022, though; TV has changed, and so have we, and most important, we can do it again.