This phenomenon launched with “The Sopranos,” but it now includes shows such as “Deadwood,” “Mad Men,” “Downton Abbey,” and “Big Love.” Each of these acclaimed series is a sprawling, multi-character exploration of a closed, often violent hierarchical system. To the contrary, “Game of Thrones” is the latest entry in television’s most esteemed category: the sophisticated cable drama about a patriarchal subculture. But, once I began sliding in disks in a stupor, it became clear that, despite the show’s Maltese vistas and asymmetrical midriff tops, this was not really an exotic property. To watch it, you must steel yourself for baby-stabbing, as well as rat torture and murder by molten gold.

It’s true that “Game of Thrones” is unusually lurid, even within the arms race of pay cable: the show is so graphic that it was parodied on “Saturday Night Live,” with a “behind-the-scenes” skit in which a horny thirteen-year-old boy acted as a consultant. Several reviews of “Game of Thrones” have taken this stance, including two notable writeups in the Times: Ginia Bellafante sniffed that the show was “boy fiction” and Neil Genzlinger called it “vileness for voyeurism’s sake,” directed at “Dungeons & Dragons types.” Fantasy-like television itself, really-has long been burdened with audience condescension: the assumption that it’s trash, or juvenile, something intrinsically icky and low. “Game of Thrones” is an ideal show to binge-watch on DVD: with its cliffhangers and Grand Guignol dazzle, it rewards a bloody, committed immersion in its foreign world-and by this I mean not only the medieval-ish landscape of Westeros (the show’s mythical realm) but the genre from which it derives. It was the right decision, even if I made it for the wrong reason. I figured I might catch up later, if the buzz was good. The episode climaxed with what might be described as an Orientalist gang rape / wedding dance. In the première, a ten-year-old boy was shoved out of a tower window. Martin, looked as if it were another guts-and-corsets melodrama, like “The Borgias,” or that other one. The HBO series, based on the best-selling fantasy books by George R.

Last year, when “Game of Thrones” landed on my desk, I skimmed two episodes and made a quick call: we’d have to let this one go. Illustration by Vasili Zorinįor critics, sorting through television pilots is an act of triage. In the mythical realm of Westeros, aristocracy is a succession of domestic traumas, as each new regent defends his bloodline.

Aristocrats games