The Return of Game of Thrones Season

By Nicholas Neyhouse on April 14, 2015

Here’s a question for you: is “Game of Thrones” bringing back the weekly television show to the world? Keep that in mind as you begin reading this.

Since after World War II the America population would go to work, come home, eat dinner, and then the entire family would sit around the television to watch their favorite sitcoms.

Shows like “I Love Lucy” and “Leave it to Beaver” came out in the 50′s, and then came the war sitcoms of the 60′s and 70′s like “Hogan’s Heroes” and “M*A*S*H”. As well there were so few options of shows that you did not have much of a choice of what to watch, and it really wasn’t about the show as much as it was to gather the family together.

Then came “Seinfeld” and “Friends”, and that brings us to the early 2000′s. Most people were still in the same routine with their weekly T.V. shows, and it would only be a few years later when DVR’s allowed a family to record shows, and families could watch what they wanted when they wanted.

The DVR was a huge change of pace, and the T.V. watching experience changed entirely. As well, networks like HBO began putting out very intellectual shows with Violence and Nudity “The Sopranos” in the late 90′s and “The Wire” in the early 2000′s, which ran alongside classic sitcom archetypes like NBC’s “The Office” and CBS’s “How I Met Your Mother”. The content on television was changing, and so was the way people viewed television.

Although I would say the biggest change to T.V. viewing was Netflix streaming, because for starters, people stopped using their televisions. Now a days you do not even have to wait for something to go on Netflix, you can find it streaming on the Internet. People binge watch T.V. shows all day, and the concept of gathering the family around to watch a show seems obsolete at this point. There is a ton of content to watch, and anyone can easily get their hands on anything, so why wait around to watch shows each week and why watch something you don’t like?

Now let’s head back to my original question. “Game of Thrones” season 5 aired last Sunday, and while you may have heard that the first 4 episodes leaked on the Internet we will ignore that factor, because unless the rest of the season gets leaked my question stays valid. I think “Game of Thrones” is bringing back the weekly T.V. show, but with a bit of a twist. In most cases people watch television as an escape from their daily troubles, and the ability to watch many episodes of a show at once is a lot of time spent away from their real life troubles. People used to watch television because it was the thing to do in the evening, but now people have so much to watch that they have to pick and choose. Now a day’s television has to be very captivating in order to bring people back each week, because of the back catalog of shows. Why would someone care to watch a show each week when they can just zone out and binge watch an old sitcom?

Well “Game of Thrones” is captivating audiences so much that it brings millions of people together each week to watch its 10 weeks of television a year. Of course most people aren’t watching it on a television, but off of HBO GO on laptops, but you can bet that we are watching it every week on Sunday evening when it airs. I know that sitcoms still run weekly, and people still watch a lot of T.V. shows on a week to week basis, but most young people I know do not care about the sitcoms their parent’s watch at home. They are too busy binge watching “Friends” because it is now on Netflix.

Photo taken by: Bonnaf on May 3rd, 2009

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