Once a show enters the zeitgeist in a massive, watercooler-dominating way, it is well nigh impossible to either escape conversation about it, spoilers all across the internet (although if you’re not watching the show they hardly matter now do they?) or to fake your way through said conversation about it without asking a million questions and getting on everyone’s nerves.
Faced with this one exclusion from the tremulous excitement of pop culture consciousness, your choices are to either throw it into the TV Lifeboat, a place for TV shows you would love to watch but for which you will never find the time, fret endlessly about missing out on all this quality viewing (my default position which makes great use of my Protestant guilt about everything), or put on a brave face and bluff your way through the minefield of possible TV show critiquing faux pas, and join in with everyone who is actually watching the show.
In the case of Game of Thrones, despite buying the books, and having the show at my 24/7 fingertips on cable, I have chosen option #2, preferring to endlessly worry about missing the show rather than making an ass of myself by trying to talk about the show with everyone else when I clearly have no direct, firsthand knowledge of the show, apart from a stray trailer or two.
Of course, in this age of multitudinous recaps, reviews and spoiler round-ups, faking it is far easier than it used to be in the old days when the only way you had to catch up on a show was to fly to the UK or USA, bale up the script writers for the show and grill them at length … at least until the police arrived to arrest you.
Using the TV equivalent of crib notes is clearly a strategy that didn’t occur to the following guy in College Humour’s hilarious new short that tells the amusingly irritating (for those around him anyway) of one man’s desire to be so included in the group that he tries to bluff his way, rather badly I might add, through a group viewing session of Game of Thrones.
Needless to say when you think that the source material for Game of Thrones is not the voluminous works by George R. R. Martin but rather Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham , and Hop on Pop, things are going to only ever end badly.
Think I will stick to guilt-ridden non-viewing even if it does render me as the last man alive to never have seen Game of Thrones.