Complicated mythologies are killing television

The final season of Game of Thrones ground to a fiery and murderous end, earlier this month. Whether you believe that it has been a remarkable exercise in sturm und drang spectacle, or  – like m’colleague Alastair – you consider it to be “an amorphous, expanding voluptuousness that can only deliver on the promise of ever cheaper thrills”, there is no doubt that it has excited imagination and popular debate in an all-consuming fashion. Unfortunately, a side-effect of this debate is to expose one of the central problems in contemporary storytelling: the building-up of a complex mythology that then collapses under its own weight before the series concludes.

Despite the much-anticipated orgy of destruction and death that Thrones concluded with, it left many viewers dissatisfied, largely because complex and intricate plot developments – in some cases carefully foreshadowed from the first series onwards – were dealt with in a rushed and unsatisfactory fashion. Watch! Jon Snow and Daenerys get it together in accidentally incestuous fashion, but oh no! She’s gone mad and megalomaniac, so he has to kill her for the good of society! This potentially operatic development is dispensed with in a matter of a few episodes, and so, unfortunately, carried all the emotional weight of an episode of Antiques Roadshow.

This was a dominant feature of the final two seasons, which were the first to be written without any of George RR Martin’s published books to rely on, and thus, in their desperate rush to tie up countless loose ends, the showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss ended up short-changing their audience. Many carefully laid threads went nowhere, most obviously in the revelation of who would eventually inherit the notorious Iron Throne. Bran Stark, its unfortunate ruler, spent most of the series staring meaningfully into space without ever demonstrating his apparent significance. For many of its viewers, the most-anticipated drama of our age ended in disappointment and flatness.

This is, of course, not a recent phenomenon. It occurred most notoriously in Lost, which developed its strange mythology – polar bears on Pacific islands, and what-have-you – over six seasons, only to end in an incomprehensible cop-out. Yet it had created its own problems from an early stage; the strange allusions to literature, philosophy and “The Others” could never be satisfactorily resolved, and so, perhaps appropriately, the journey proved to be a great deal more interesting than the destination.

A similar problem beset the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films. The first was an entertaining romp, with a justly Oscar-nominated performance from Johnny Depp as the rakish Captain Jack Sparrow. The second and third were largely meaningless exercises into delving into a pointlessly over-complicated lore, made up of endless references to the newly-canonical pirate code. For the uninitiated, they are mainly notable for Tom Hollander’s spectacular death scene in the last film, to say nothing of the spectacle of a CGI Bill Nighy as Davy Jones (of locker fame). Fun and excitement are in very short supply.

This remains an enduring problem in both film and television – and, arguably, literature as well. (The Harry Potter books spring to mind, but their hectic and confused cinematic adaptations make the originals look like a model of clarity and purpose.) Over and over again, there is an instinct on the part of writers, producers and directors to over-egg a straightforward narrative and thereby transform it into that dread thing, ‘An Epic’.

Look at the otherwise excellent Line of Duty. What began as a particularly smart and well-written police procedural, offering fine roles to an assortment of great actors, has disappeared into a rather silly cul-de-sac, thanks to its creator Jed Mercurio’s apparent obsession with introducing a kind of Godfather figure into the series known as ‘H’. There was much unsubtle hinting that Ted Hastings, the head of the anti-corruption division AC-12, was in fact H himself, until it was revealed in faintly absurd fashion at the end of the final series that H was not a name, but a piece of Morse code tapped out by the dying ‘caddy’.

The suspicion now lingers that Mercurio has been sidetracked away from what made the series so good – the long, intense interrogation scenes, in which power shifted between the characters with a force and verve that bore comparison to Pinter – and has instead embraced a trashier aesthetic more in keeping with his hit programme Bodyguard. One hopes that the next series – which promises more of Anna Maxwell Martin’s coolly sociopathic investigator – will strip out the extraneous padding and concentrate on what it does best; character actors staring at one another in a room and making discussion of documents and CCTV more thrilling than any gunfight or car chase.

Yet there is, surprisingly, one golden example of where a complicated mythology has come good. Whether or not one cares for the Marvel films and the cinematic universe that its overlord Kevin Feige has created, there can be no doubt that the multi-billion-dollar behemoth has continued to lure in audiences by the score thanks to a simple contract with the viewer. Each film follows sequentially from the last, introducing new characters in their own adventure, but allowing call-backs and suggestions of future developments in an elegant and comprehensible fashion. This resulted in this year’s latest Avengers film, Endgame, which, for all the opportunities that it offered smart-arse critics to make jokes about mega-budgeted Beckett adaptations, looks as if it will dethrone Avatar to become the highest-grossing film ever made. It might be disposable, simplistic pap, an orgy of special effects and patriotism spiced up with a few amusing one-liners, but it has remained entirely true to itself and its roots, and its viewers left relieved and sated, rather than frustrated.

Of course, we should applaud those who strive to create a complex and all-enveloping narrative within their work, and sometimes it is more laudable to fail gloriously than to succeed modestly. It just remains a pity when, whether out of hubris, laziness or simple panic, good storytelling ends up being needlessly complicated by a desire to build a universe. Sometimes, there is a lot to be said for remembering Maurice Saatchi’s most famous maxim: “brutal simplicity of thought”. Let’s hope that the next generation of writers can bear that in mind.