alt Hacker NewsI liked season 1 of the Expanse - the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on.
I am worried that Game of Thrones ruined a generation of sci-fi and fantasy - everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone. Even besides the fact that we are manifesting a world where progress is impossible, it has turned genres that is traditionally very positive and escapist into bleak emotional slogs.
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> I liked season 1 of the Expanse - the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on.
I recommend reading the original book series. In my opinion the writing only gets better as it goes on, and it’s obvious the writers had a plan in mind from the beginning rather than just writing more books for the sake of continuing a series where the ideas were all used up in the first book or two
Expanse is a very strange tv show. Their main cast is utterly bland and have absolutely no chemistry with each other, the only interesting character is maybe Amos, but almost all secondary characters are top notch, with lots of great actors and tons of charisma. It is typical for some belter captain who appears in 2 episodes to effortlessly outshine the whole Rocinante crew.
> everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone.
GoT was a late-comer to this. For me, William Gibson’s _Neuromancer_ (1984) was my first exposure to dark and morally-compromised Sci-Fi. I am sure it predates this in novels. _Neuromancer_ inspired a couple of movies in the 90s: The Net and Johnny Mneumonic come to mind.
In US TV shows, I think Babylon 5 started the lean into the dark tone, and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica of the 2000s is a better example than GoT.