Prurient pleasures: Adapting fantasy to HBO

In recent years, the American premium cable channel HBO has come in for quite a bit of attention as the vanguard of ‘quality television’. Though its adaptations in miniseries form are relatively longstanding, it is only recently that they have produced series as adaptations, notably in the popular and critical favourites Game of Thrones (2011–) and True Blood (2008–), the adaptations of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga and Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries series. Both TV series, though critical and popular successes, have been subject to criticisms for their very explicit subject matter; as such, I propose to examine the reasons for the eroticism of the two series, as well as the function that it serves, so as to better determine the extent to which the emphasis on eros stems from their source texts, their medium, or the requirements of their production at HBO. In so doing, I hope to elucidate exactly what is meant by that very fraught term ‘quality television’, especially as it relates to the titillating nature of these series.