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Dead Tree Alert: The Westeros Wing; or, Why Game of Thrones is the Best Show About Politics

James Poniewozik — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:14:22 +0000

There’s no new Game of Thrones this Sunday; HBO is running the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra (and you can find Richard Corliss’ review of the movie from Cannes here). In the meantime, you can read my column in the print TIME magazine this week (subscription required) on why Game of Thrones is TV’s best current show about politics. One reason GoT is so bracingly different from other pop-culture fantasy stories is how it combines the fantastical with the realistic—in this case, realistic attention to the way power is gained, maintained, and exercised. Rather than fall into simple idealism or cheap cynicism, the show is bluntly practical: one big theme of the Ned Stark story in season one, for instance, is that Ned’s rigid morality and sense of integrity was both his great strength and the reason he finally failed. By season three, many of the show’s storylines, not just the ones in King’s Landing, are about politics and leadership. The clash between the libertarian attitudes of the Wildlings and the rigid social structure of the southerners. Dany’s journey through the East, which has been a series of lessons on how to earn, rather than simply command, a loyal following. The travails of the Night’s Watch, a nonaligned group meant to fend off a worldwide threat, which has been neglected through generations of political infighting and myopic leadership. The management of King’s Landing and its looming problem of foreign debt. The destabilizing forces of populism and religious fervor. And the non-military, non-magical sources of power, whether they be rich farmland or a useful intelligence network. In the column, I break down Game of Thrones’ story arcs and ideas into seven—of course—political lessons. The column is behind the paywall, so I can’t reprint it here, but I can list the bullet points, can’t I? Of course I can! Hope Isn’t Enough. Alliances Are Tricky. Loyalty Beats Fear. Don’t Skimp on Infrastructure. Religion Is a Tinderbox. Sovereign Debt Is a Killer. Watch Out for the 99%! I could have gone on, but

TV Tonight: Does Someone Have to Go?

James Poniewozik — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:37:52 +0000

The premise for an awful reality show and the premise for an excellent reality show are one and the same. A strong reality premise—strand people on an island, race around the world—is what gets your attention. But what makes it mean-spirited or good-hearted, excruciating or delightful, sleazy or gratifying, is the execution. Protestors drove ABC’s Welcome to the Neighborhood off the air in 2005 before it ever debuted, because of the premise (seven couples, including minorities, competed to win a house and were judged by their future neighbors); later, after actually seeing all the episodes, gay-rights-advocacy group GLAAD endorsed it. Spike TV’s The Joe Schmo Show–which surrounded a “contestant” with actors–could have been a cruel joke; it turned out to be a pitch-perfect and good-natured parody. All of this is to say that, despite its premise, I went into Does Someone Have to Go?—Fox’s new reality show in which coworkers select some of their number for possible firing—assuming that it might not be as bad as you would think. As it turns out, Does Someone Have to Go? is exactly bad as you would think. Now admittedly, the title itself was a pretty good hint that this show was not going to take the high road when it came to conflict resolution in the workplace. The series visits a string of troubled workplaces, promising to “give employees a voice” in solving the office’s problems—by confronting one another, blaming one another for the dysfunction, and voting for three candidates for possible elimination. You could probably make a good reality show about visiting a workplace, identifying what and who isn’t working, and forcing some sort of crisis to make clear what the group needs to do better: that’s essentially what, say, Kitchen Nightmares or Restaurant: Impossible does in the food-service business. Those shows can be overdramatic or manipulated, but when they work—see, for instance, the absolutely bananas “Amy’s Baking Company” episode of Kitchen Nightmares–they can be revealing snapshots of how a bad workplace gets that way, and how individual neurosis becomes everyone’s

Why Reality TV Is the New Family TV

James Poniewozik — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:12:30 +0000

Thirteen summers ago, when a pair of shows called Survivor and Big Brother debuted on CBS, there were uneasy cries that reality TV was coarsening our civilization. Contestants were encouraged to lie and backstab one another! People were eating actual rats! What was going to be next: snuff films? Thirteen years later, you can debate how well reality TV, overall, has fulfilled its promise as a hell-bound handbasket. But I do know this: when the regular TV season ended last week and the summer premiere season started, it was an exciting time at home, because it meant Masterchef was coming back, and we could watch it together with the Tuned In Jrs. Reality TV is a big, diverse medium, of course: some of it is raunchy, some of it ugly, some obnoxious (like tonight’s despicable let’s-fire-someone-fest Does Someone Have to Go? on Fox), and some of it very, very good. In other words, it’s not unlike scripted TV. But another funny thing has happened over the past generation: reality TV has also become the new version, and maybe the last bastion, of primetime family viewing. It’s not just Masterchef: nearly every TV series my wife and I watch with the Tuned In Jrs. is a reality show. We handicap The Voice contestants’ odds every week. The Amazing Race has given us a whole new perspective on airport travel. Shark Tank captivates the kids, and has shown me—one of the least entrepreneurial people I know—what a fascinating process valuing a business is. Top Chef, Chopped, Market Warriors—if it involves cooking or selling something, we’ll watch it. Other families I know, anecdotally, are into Storage Wars or Duck Dynasty (the latter, I guess, much like families in the ’60s were into The Beverly Hillbillies). Most of these are competition reality shows, which is no accident: like sports, reality shows like these are a genre of TV that can appeal to kids’ and adult interests without denying either one. Most of these series are made for adults, often without any particular goal of

Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz Talks About Getting the Bluths Back Together

James Poniewozik — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:09:24 +0000

On Sunday, May 26, Netflix will debut 15 new episodes of Arrested Development. I visited the set last fall, and my feature on the revival ran in the print TIME magazine a couple weeks ago. This week, I’m excerpting some interviews I did for the piece. Mitch Hurwitz, the show’s creator, writer, and all-around mad genius, discussed the revival with me on the phone a few weeks ago, while in post-production on the new season: So, are you editing episodes at this stage? Hurwitz: Yeah. The episodes have to be essentially locked in like 12 days and I still have like three hours of content which is like three movies. So it’s this crazy pace – it’s been kind of around the clock. But I’m getting there. I’m getting there. That actually brings up a question: are you locked into, you know, whatever – 22, 25, 30 minutes an episode? They can be different lengths, right? Exactly, and that’s been a big relief. The old show had to be something like 20 minutes and 45 seconds – something like that. It’s a crazy short amount of time so it really honed my skills at the concentration process. You just – distill and distill and distill the material, and I’d look at those old shows and think, “Oh, my God. I can’t believe we did that in 20 minutes.” Now the new show basically I’m looking at it as a whole and it’s probably gonna be about eight-and-a-half hours which is, I think, longer than the first season was altogether. One of the many things that was so great and distinctive about the old episodes was that you really crammed a lot in them; I imagine part of that was sort of a side benefit of the running time that commercials forced on you. And yet I imagine you want to retain that familiar piece and metabolism for the show. Yeah, my goal was actually to get the episodes as short as possible, and I just couldn’t do it. There was

Ron Howard Talks the Arrested Development Reunion

James Poniewozik — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:03:14 +0000

On Sunday, May 26, Netflix will debut 15 new episodes of Arrested Development. I visited the set last fall, and my feature on the revival ran in the print TIME magazine a couple weeks ago. This week, I’m excerpting some interviews I did for the piece. Below, executive producer, narrator—and, in the new episodes, guest star—Ron Howard talks about bringing the show back from the dead: There had been talk ever since Arrested Development left Fox of trying to revive it somewhere. Why, in your view, did this deal work out when previous attempts (like getting it to Showtime) didn’t? Ron Howard: Well, ultimately this is all just an outgrowth of our ongoing ambition to try to do the Arrested Development movie. But as time went by and Mitch started developing the movie, trying to break the story, he said, “My problem is is I’m investing a minimum of 40 minutes, just trying to quickly catch everybody up because the cast is so large.” And he started telling me what he thought people had been through and where they were in the world. It was just hilarious. And I said, “It’s almost like every one of those scenarios is basically an episode, Mitch.” And he kind of laughed about it and the next day he said, “You know, maybe those could be episodes. Maybe we should do that.” Separately, Ted [Sarandos, content head for Netflix] bumped into me at a Superbowl party and said, “Hey, have you ever thought about doing some more episodes? The Netflix fans love Arrested Development and the statistics prove it.” At the end of the day I think Mitch kind of felt, and I think he’s right, that Arrested Development has always been kind of a, you know, it’s been at its heart something that was a bit of an experiment. And it was about taking some chances. And there was something consistent with that in trying this Netflix model. In fact the only reason we were already having the conversation was that the show

Game of Thrones Watch: Sons and Daughters

James Poniewozik — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:45:14 +0000

Spoilers for last night’s Game of Thrones below: “I think mothers and fathers made up the gods because they wanted their children to sleep through the night.” —Davos Seaworth Davos is a lowborn smuggler, but partly because of that, he has something that counts as a luxury in the world of Game of Thrones: the freedom to love his children, and worry about them–and sadly, in his case, mourn them–as his children, not as assets or bargaining pieces. It is Davos, who lost a son, who is able to talk Stannis out of sacrificing his own blood (in the form of Gendry’s blood) in the interests of power and of his royal house. And it makes him one of the few moral lights of “Second Sons,” an episode very much about heredity and power, bad parents and traded-away children. A bit of trivia about that title. The Second Sons, in this episode, are the mercenary company under contract to Yunkai. The Second Sons are in the original source novels, but Benioff and Weiss have done a little rejiggering here—in the books, Daario (the mercenary who crosses over to Dany) is a member of a different sellsword group, the Stormcrows. (I won’t go into the details of the switch here, and I ask fellow book-readers not to do so in the comments either.) I don’t know if they did it intentionally for thematic reasons, but the name change and title brought together the circumstances of many of the characters in this episode. What is a second son, after all? He’s not the heir. He’s the spare. He might try to jump himself up, but as Renly Baratheon discovered, that’s frowned upon. He might—and one wonders if this is where the name comes from—go out and make his fortune in a mercenary company. Or he might, like Tyrion, find himself married off unwillingly to an unwilling bride, while his father dismisses his accomplishments and his douchebag nephew takes away his stool and sniggers. As played by Peter Dinklage, Tyrion has been a

The Office Watch: That’s What She Said

James Poniewozik — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:18:33 +0000

Spoilers for the series finale of The Office follow: When Ricky Gervais’ UK version of The Office ended with a movie-sized episode, it had significant plot business to take care of: David Brent’s post-firing spiral into the worst kind of fame-chasing, Tim and Dawn’s relationship status, the effect that the airing of the Wernham-Hogg documentary had on the characters. It resolved storylines, and ended a bitterly, darkly funny show on a note of redemption and hope. The oversized finale of the American The Office was also focused on the aftermath of the documentary, but it captured the differences between the two incarnations of this series. The wasn’t much plot business hanging over the finale (with the exception of Pam and Jim’s story, which I’ll get to). It put a period on a lot of journeys (Erin finding her birth parents, e.g.), but it wasn’t really crucial to the story: we saw Dwight and Angela’s wedding, for instance, but we already knew they would end up together. This Office, after all, had nine years to wrap up its business; its central character, Michael Scott, found his dream and made his exit two years ago. Mostly, the work of “Finale” was emotional: to hit the warm, big-hearted notes that distinguished this series from its parent, and to remind us why we fell in love with the characters individually, and why they came to love each other collectively over the course of a “stupid, wonderful, boring, amazing job.” It used every device in the emotional-comedy playbook to do it: a wedding, reunions, flashback footage, a romantic gesture, a goodbye song. It was touching, sweet, funny, messy, a little manipulative. And in the end, it worked. I suspect that, if I go back and re-watch this finale a year or two from now, I’ll find it worked more as a farewell to the previous nine seasons than as an episode in and of itself. The stuff that was like latter-seasons Office (the Andy-centricity, the Dwight zaniness) was all right; the stuff that recalled the

Upfronts Watch: At CBS, These Are the Good Old Days

James Poniewozik — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:26:27 +0000

In one of the later episodes of 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy unveiled a strategy to reverse NBC‘s ratings troubles: “Make it 1997 again, by science or magic.” In a way, CBS has managed to do that. Other than the addition of some reality shows, it pretty much programs its network and runs its business as if it were still the 1990s: a time when Americans watch sitcoms in big numbers, turn out for crime dramas in droves, and stay loyal to their favorite programs for years and years. And it works–it works pretty much only for CBS anymore, and it doesn’t work perfectly even for them, but it works. While the other major broadcasters are struggling with technological and cultural change, trying to compete with cable at its game, and adjusting to an era of diminished expectations, CBS draws large audiences (not as big as they once were, but still) to watch old-fashioned shows on old-fashioned TV. So in the world of CBS, it’s still the ’90s, in the best business sense. This season, CBS is winning the 18 to 49 advertising demographic for the first time in 22 years. You might argue that is partly a function of other networks dropping (see: American Idol) as much as it is CBS rising—but so what? In TV today, not falling is the new rising, and first place is first place. And the other networks know it, as Jimmy Kimmel put it during a standup routine at ABC’s upfront Tuesday: “CBS. Those smug m—–f——s.” CBS isn’t entirely immune to change, but it’s incremental: next fall, it will add one new drama and four sitcoms, as it expands its comedy night on Thursday. (A sign it knows its hit sitcoms aren’t getting any younger.) A couple of its new comedies will be single-camera (i.e., shot in the movie-like style of The Office) rather than in the multi-camera, studio-audience style of most of CBS’s current sitcoms. Still, three of the new fall comedies (We Are Men, Mom, and The Millers) are typically broad. (If

Six Ways The Office Mattered

James Poniewozik — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:45:58 +0000

If any TV show is lucky enough, it will last to the point when it will seem tired, repetitive, business as usual. The Office, which ends its last season after nine years tonight, may arguably have reached that point; however well it ends, it will have been punching the clock for a long time. But it’s worth remembering, however much we’re used to the show’s style and comedy now, that network-TV sitcoms were a different breed when the American version of the show came on the air in 2005. Tomorrow, we can talk about how good or bad its finale was. Today, let’s remember some of the ways it influenced the sitcoms that came after it: It Adapted Scripted TV to the Reality-TV Era. The Office’s mockumentary format had been used before it in movies, like Christopher Guest’s comedies. But to NBC’s primetime audience, its signifiers–the confessional interviews, the cameras rushing to keep up with the action–were more immediately familiar from reality TV, which in 2005 people were talking about replacing sitcoms altogether. Instead, The Office–and then shows that followed it, like Modern Family–used these tropes as a new language for telling stories and explaining characters. Like many of the accomplishments of The Office (USA), this one was preceded by The Office (UK). And Arrested Development had a quasi-documentary format in 2003. But maybe one of the reasons it didn’t last longer was that audiences weren’t used to the format yet. Whether or not The Office did it better, it at least had better timing. It Brought Back the Single-Camera Sitcom. For non-TV-geeks: What’s a single-camera sitcom? A show that’s shot, like a TV drama, with one camera at a time, allowing it to use various locations and settings and to look more “movie-like.” (A multi-camera comedy trains multiple cameras on a stage set, usually with a live audience; think Friends or The Big Bang Theory.) You’d think that single-cameras would offer more creative options, but since the heyday of M*A*S*H they were superseded by multi-cams, which looked like theater

Upfronts Watch: ABC Seeks More Fantasies and Fairytales (But No Happy Endings)

James Poniewozik — Wed, 15 May 2013 09:45:57 +0000

ABC has had the benefit, over the past couple of seasons, of not having failures that are as spectacular as NBC’s. As Buzzfeed’s Kate Aurthur pointed out in March, while ABC has been battling NBC for last place among the four big networks, it’s NBC that has gotten most of the bad press. Part of it is the farther-to-fall effect: NBC has the narrative of descending from its glories of the ’80s and ’90s. NBC’s bombs have arguably been more calamitous (Do No Harm), or, if not that, more hotly hyped before collapsing (Smash). And that’s to say nothing of NBC’s bad press outside primetime–the self-immolation of the Today show, the fumbling of the Tonight Show a few years back. So ABC has had to deal with less bad news (fittingly, Disney-ABC TV president Anne Sweeney began the upfront boasting about Jimmy Kimmel and Good Morning America’s ratings success). But you can’t pay the bills with not-bad-news. Its fall schedule announcement, then, is trying to make up for the network’s lack of new hits by returning to what’s worked for them in the recent past—escapist fantasies and heightened drama serials—and trying again to develop more comedy hits to match Modern Family. The latter new shows come at the expense of Happy Endings, the rippingly funny ensemble show that never caught on beyond a cult audience. In a conference call today, ABC president Paul Lee said that that show, though loved by critics and a passionate fanbase, was just “too narrow” for a broadcast network to justify keeping. The brand identity that has worked for ABC lately is family comedy on the one hand, and fantasy and emotion on the other–which applies not just to Once Upon a Time or Scandal but also to reality shows like The Bachelor. Which is also to say that ABC is the major network that above all knows that women watch the bulk of primetime network TV. (You know you are at ABC’s upfront and not NBC’s, Fox’s, or CBS’s because, when they play the

Dr. Joyce Brothers, TV’s Beautiful Mind, Dies at 85

James Poniewozik — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:28:12 +0000

Dr. Joyce Brothers, who died Monday at age 85, was one of the first examples of a public figure who had a career of, by, and through TV. Before it was commonplace for psychologists, advice-givers, and sundry gurus to have syndicated shows and accompanying media empires, Brothers used an improbable career in the electronic age to brand herself as a pop-culture counselor and people’s academic: an approachably brilliant woman who knew more than you did about anything and everything, including your own mind. Brothers’ media career began with the 1950s’ equivalent of reality-TV stardom: in 1955, to earn raise extra money, she went on the quiz show The $64,000 Question as an expert on boxing–a field she knew little of anything about until she decided to make herself an expert for the sake of the game show. (Unlike the scandal-tainted appearances of some later contestants, Brothers’ knowledge and winnings were genuine.) She later did a stint as a boxing color commentator, proving herself a natural broadcaster and a double curiosity: not just a lady who knew sports (in the men’s world of 1950s TV) but an academic who wasn’t above popular media. Her surprising fame, combined with her PhD training in psychology, led her to a string of TV advice shows and print columns through the ’50s and ’60s. It was the time in Cold War American culture when therapy and psychology were breaking into popular consciousness, in everything from the comedy of Bob Newhart to the panels of Peanuts, and the country was ready for a chipper counselor to the masses. I was born after Brothers’ heyday as a TV advice host; like other children of the ’70s, my first memory of her is as a near-ubiquitous guest on every kind of TV show imaginable—Happy Days, The Tonight Show, Mama’s Family, What’s My Line?, and (see the video above to believe it) Sha Na Na, to name a few. In a way Brothers’ TV ambassadorship for psychology may have been as influential as the advice she dispensed: with a

HIMYM Watch: Mother’s Day

James Poniewozik — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:31:37 +0000

Over the years, I had developed all manner of theories as to how How I Met Your Mother would somehow get around ever introducing the title character (or, maybe, get Ted together with Robin without contradicting its founding conundrum). The “kids” would, somehow, actually not be Ted’s biological children. Future Ted would keel over from a heart attack in the finale, just before the reveal. The entire framing device would be the fantasy of an elderly Ted Mosby, dying unloved and alone. Instead, after eight seasons–and pending some further twist I haven’t anticipated—last night’s season finale delivered: one Future Mother, in the doe-eyed person of theater actress Cristin Milioti. Kudos to the producers for somehow pulling this off, in this day and age, without the casting news getting leaked to the high heavens. Now this sets up the show’s endgame: namely, with a big question answered, will the final season be worth watching? After watching every episode religiously for the first six seasons (and blogging many of them), I’ve drifted away from the show the past two years; this season, I was lucky if I caught one episode a month to keep up. There’s no point in re-rehearsing the reasons in detail—the show got too caught up in Barney’s wackiness, the narrative tricks that were exciting in the show’s first few seasons didn’t feel as fresh anymore. That said, one thing that didn’t bother me over the last few seasons was whether or when the Mother would be revealed—to me, it was just an intriguing side game that only became a problem when the mechanics of it got in the way of the central stories. But now that Mom is cast and on stage, I’m hoping that the change will revitalize the show for its next and final season. I was always going to watch the series finale anyway: there are some shows where, even if you’ve lost interest, you’re invested enough that you have to come home in the end. That’s what, say, The O.C. and Dawson’s Creek were

Upfronts Watch: Fox Cuts Jack Bauer In Half

James Poniewozik — Tue, 14 May 2013 09:45:31 +0000

When Fox previewed its new drama, 24, at its upfront announcements for advertisers a dozen years ago on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, it was as new a thing as had been seen in prime-time TV in a good while. It had a radical format (a story told in real time), unusual visuals (different events unfolding on multiscreens, like the open windows on a computer desktop), and the novel (then, for TV) approach of telling a story about terrorism with the scale of a feature movie. Fox’s biggest announcement at its upfront Monday was, on the surface, pretty old news, because–well, it was 24. The show, which went off the air after nearly a decade’s run at the height of the war on terror era, is coming back next summer, as an “event series”: one story told over 12 hours (despite the show’s title), as 24: Live Another Day. I don’t feel strongly about 24 coming back. It was a great thriller for a while, and then it got ludicrous, but even it it’s late years it showed that it could, now and again, be gripping and emotionally compelling. By the time it went off the air, it was tired, sure, but it’s had some rest, and I could see Kiefer Sutherland and company pulling this off every few years, say, not unlike an American answer to the James Bond franchise. The revival will be good, or it won’t. What’s more interesting, and long-term exciting, is how Fox is bringing the show back: as part of a long-term strategy to make one-shot series, with several others in the pipeline. Fox also announced the 10-episode Wayward Pines from M. Night Shyamalan and starring Matt Dillon, which will run next year. In the works: a Billy the Kid Western from Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson, a Civil War series, a series about the OJ Simpson trial, and a remake of Shogun. That last example suggests that “event series” is really Fox putting a trendy title on a very old thing,

Upfronts Watch: NBC Tries to Turn Around Its Turnaround

James Poniewozik — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:04:02 +0000

Last season was to be turnaround year for NBC. Struggling in the primetime ratings, the network was going to move away from niche sitcoms like Community and Parks and Recreation and aim for “broader” comedies with more mass appeal. It would use the promotional power of shows like The Voice to launch new big hits like genre drama Revolution. And new chief Robert Greenblatt was now fully in charge to work his programming magic on the network, taking gambles on shows like his pet project, Smash. Now, for 2013–14, NBC is trying to turn around its turnaround. Smash is canceled. So are most of NBC’s sitcoms—except Community (returning midseason) and Parks and Recreation. The Voice is a huge hit; the shows that have followed The Voice, meh. And at its upfront presentation to advertisers at Radio City Music Hall in New York, Greenblatt introduced a new schedule of broad-aiming sitcoms and genre dramas. There’s no reason it can’t work. But there’s no denying that NBC is, at best, pretty much where it was when it started the season. Its problems are much the same. With few existing hits–basically, The Voice and football–many of NBC’s new shows will need to be self-starters. Last year, they didn’t self-start. Now, for instance, the network will try to relaunch most of Thursday, with the once must-see night bookended by Parks and Parenthood–two fine shows, neither a mass ratings hit. NBC is trying to compensate, partly, with familiar names: there will be a sitcom with Michael J. Fox and one with Sean Hayes, a remake of Ironside with Blair Underwood, and an espionage drama with James Spader. It is also, as it does biennially, promising that the Olympics will be a great launch platform to promote its midseason shows. Let us be blunt. NBC has been saying this for over a decade. The only show that the Olympics are a great, tested promotional platform for is the next Olympics. NBC’s new crop of shows may succeed, but it will have to be on their own

Game of Thrones Watch: Dragons and Eagles and Bears, Oh, My!

James Poniewozik — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:45:54 +0000

Spoilers for Game of Thrones, “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” below: “That they’ll work together when it suits them, that they’re loyal when it suits them, love each other when it suits them, and they kill each other when it suits them.” Everyone on Game of Thrones is an animal. Usually it’s figurative: our major characters are mostly nobles, their houses represented by wolves, lions, kraken, stags, and whatnot. This is a quasi-medieval society, still close enough to its primitive roots to carry over the animistic idea that people can ally with animals and, thereby, take on their strength. Sometimes it’s more than figurative: Danaerys is not only a “dragon,” figuratively, she has dragons and is in all but strict biology their mother. And then there are the characters who, at least when they choose to be, literally are animals. Our enigmatic friend Jojen has told Bran that he is a warg–a mystic able to enter the minds of animals–and, complicating matters, that the three-eyed crow in Bran’s dreams is Bran himself. Adding to our bestiary, “crow” is a term for members of the Night’s Watch, and our favorite one, Jon Snow, has recently gotten a glimpse of a warg in action: Orell, who performs wildling reconnaissance by bonding with an eagle. The eagle, it seems, does not care for the crow: implicit in Orell’s speech, about what wisdom he has learned from the birds, is that Orell understands the wild, close-to-nature ways of his people (and thus Ygritte) in a way that Jon never will. “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” opens literally from the vantage point of that eagle, whose cry is the first thing we hear. And this eagle-eyed perspective is a fitting one for the episode, which takes a wide, sweeping view of the wide swath of Game of Thrones’ stories, and–as ably directed by Michelle MacLaren–looks fantastic doing it. It’s interesting that this is the one episode of season three written by George R. R. Martin, author of the Song of Ice and Fire