My wife and I don’t watch a ton of TV, but we watch our share. Early in our relationship, we watched most of Game of Thrones together after it had been out for years, and it was glorious. Now we’re rewatching the first season of House of Dragons again, and it’s also great. As in, I would very much recommend it to anyone. But it’s not the same as GoT.
House of Dragons is what the TV critic James Poniewozik, writing for the New York Times, calls mid TV.
In other words, it’s really good, and that’s…fine.
I would recommend the essay and also, maybe even more, the summary from Kottke. Here is the basic jist:
Mid TV, on the other hand, almost can’t be bad for some of the same reasons that keep it from being great. It’s often an echo of the last generation of breakthrough TV (so the highs and lows of “Game of Thrones” are succeeded by the faithful adequacy of “House of the Dragon”). Or it’s made by professionals who know how to make TV too well, and therefore miss a prerequisite of making great art, which is training yourself to forget how the thing was ever done and thus coming up with your own way of doing it.
Mid is not a strict genre with a universal definition. But it’s what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot. It substitutes great casting for great ideas. (You really liked the star in that other thing! You can’t believe they got Meryl Streep!)
Mid is based on a well-known book or movie or murder. Mid looks great on a big screen. (Though for some reason everything looks blue.) Mid was shot on location in multiple countries. Mid probably could have been a couple episodes shorter. Mid is fine, though. It’s good enough.
Above all, Mid is easy. It’s not dumb easy — it shows evidence that its writers have read books. But the story beats are familiar. Plot points and themes are repeated. You don’t have to immerse yourself single-mindedly the way you might have with, say, “The Wire.” It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to.
The example that jumps to mind of something that’s not mid TV in recent memory is Better Call Saul, the sequel-prequel (just like HoD is to GoT) to Breaking Bad. Those are monumental, rip-your-head-off types of shows.
I would always want there to be more of that kind of top-tier TV, but maybe, just maybe, it’s ok that there is space in between for, you know, dragons.
As James puts it so well:
“Any honest critic has to recognize that people for whom TV-watching is not work do not always want to work at watching TV.”
Comments welcome!