Tonight marks the premiere of Season 5 of HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones and, as is becoming common these days, 4 episodes of the drama have leaked online.
Since I am not a spoiler-mongerer, I won’t link to where you can find them. But I don’t think it really matters as far as the viewing audience is concerned. In fact, in the past, HBO has celebrated the piracy.
Bad news today for HBO, which is attempting to marry the recent debut of their HBO Now streaming service with season 5 of Game of Thrones. As of last night, the first four episodes of the new season, nearly half of the ten total episodes, have been leaked online to various torrent sites.
After appearing online yesterday afternoon, the episodes have already been downloaded almost 800,000 times, and that figure will likely blow past a million downloads by the season 5 premiere tonight.
Game of Thrones has consistently set records for piracy, which has almost been a point of pride for HBO. Last year, when it was announced HBO set a world record for illegal downloads after the season four premiere, Time Warner TWX -0.14% CEO Jeff Bewkes had this to say.
“Our experience is [piracy] leads to more penetration, more paying subs, more health for HBO, less reliance on having to do paid advertising… If you go around the world, I think you’re right, Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world. Well, you know, that’s better than an Emmy.”
It’s a refreshing view of piracy as a means of audience engagement, but that was in reference to the ability of pirates to upload episodes of Game of Thrones shortly after they air, and this is a different situation in which four episodes have leaked weeks before the later ones were supposed to air.
How this happened isn’t a mystery. The press has had their hands on four episodes worth of press screeners for a while now, so someone that was trusted with those review materials clearly should not have been. We see this happen every single year with screeners for the top Oscar nominated films, but to my knowledge, Game of Thrones hasn’t had to deal with this kind of leak before.
This is a variation of the famous actor’s dictum, “I don’t care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right.” Indeed, the downloads represent advertising that HBO can’t buy at any price. I can’t say that HBO is necessarily pleased that episodes that won’t be seen for a month are available for download, but neither is there likely to be panic at the prospect.
I prefer to get my Game of Thrones as it’s broadcast, spoilers be damned. The bewildering array of characters are nearly impossible to remember and follow, so here are a couple of handy guides to help you. If you’ve follow the series closely, this chart by USA Today will be of great assistance as you watch the show.
But if you’re new to the series, this photo guide from Access Hollywood with thumbnail commentary will bring you up to speed.
In telling us what he likes about Game of Thrones, Jim Geraghty says the multitude of characters is a big plus:
What I love about Game of Thrones:
It’s different. It doesn’t look like any other show on television. Almost every episode looks like an epic movie: The scale is huge, the sets are huge, the number of key characters is enormous. Every season is just ten episodes, and something important and consequential occurs in just about all of them.
It’s complicated. Here’s where Game of Thrones compares to Twin Peaks; my favorite early-90s surreal comic-horror murder mystery had a good thirty-to-forty characters of significance during its run. A lot of shows effectively “talk down” to their audience by simplifying things and creating worlds where everything of importance is done by the same half-dozen people every week. For example, on Castle, we almost never see Castle and Becket interacting with any cops or police personnel outside of the main cast. As far as viewers can tell, the precinct consists of three detectives, a captain, two medical examiners, and Castle the consultant. To keep costs down, anyone in the background – other detectives, uniformed officers, secretarial staff, etc. – rarely, if ever, speak a line of dialogue. Most cop shows are the same, as are most doctor shows and legal dramas.
The limited terms of those shows work well enough, but in real life we interact with lots of people throughout the day – and the world of Game of Thrones presents multiple members of multiple families in an enormously complicated web of rivalries, shifting alliances, secret agendas and vendettas, etc. This is a show that rewards playing close attention – and like most of my cult-hit favorites, you feel as though there’s a lot going on off-screen.
No doubt there will be shocks and plot twists to satisfy the most cynical among us. Characters we’ve come to know and love will be killed off — probably suddenly and brutally. But that is why the series is so compelling.
My DVR is already set. Is yours?
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