Every streaming service wants to make the next Game of Thrones. Barring the last two seasons’ abysmal ratings, George R.R. Martin’s book-based drama had studios the world over greening with envy, and because of that, viewers have been subjected to a flood of poorly conceived imitations the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Harry Potter films and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. What truly drives me bananas, however, is when a much beloved property like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, or—I kid you not—the New Testament (The Chosen) is forced into the Game of Thrones mold, where every background character becomes a protagonist, every setting becomes a world, and every plot point becomes an overinflated epic. Anyone with even a passing interest in storytelling will tell you what worked for one book may not work for another, and that executives can’t turn every story into Game of Thrones, no matter how badly they want to. Style, tone, pacing, and authorial intent must be respected when adapting a novel for the screen. But the billionaires calling the shots don’t know what any of those terms mean. They know to do one thing and one thing only: copy, copy, copy, even when what they are copying is a square block meant for a round hole. Unfortunately for us, the viewers, shoving a Game of Thrones peg into a His Dark Materials hole makes for some pretty crappy television.
For lack of a much better term, I call this trend “game-of-thrones-ification.”
The Art of Storytelling 
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