A friend who works in TV explained to me once how Game of Thrones had ruined our attention spans, packing in too much event. Dragons, nakedness, intrigue, gore – ooh, new place, where are we again? – monsters, weather, foreboding, jousts ..
. as much went on in any given five minutes as would normally sustain a show for a whole season. Relatedly, the rest of television felt unbearably slow.
Perfectly good dramas were all of a sudden like eating bran or taking medicine. “How in God’s name are those two adversaries still conversing?” you’d think, watching, I don’t know, House of Cards. “Why can’t one of them simply melt a cauldron of gold and use it to drown the other?” For a long time, GoT didn’t just win some Emmys, it won all of them.
Starting with Peter Dinklage , who won best supporting actor in 2011, more or less everyone in it was best supporting something. It was the outstanding drama, but also had the best sound, the best credits, the best prosthetics; it was the best sci-fi/fantasy. By 2016, it was the most Emmy-decorated show in history .
It was almost as if that august awards body were surrendering to a new normal: that’s what box sets are now – an immense amount of stuff must occur; nothing less will do. Then along comes Shōgun, last night’s Emmy winner: the first non-English-language show ever to take best drama. It’s set in 1600 and there are no dragons at all, but there’s quite a lot of detailed trading negotiation.
There are mul.