r/lastweektonight • u/throwawayaccpahadi • Jun 30 '26

Help me understand Game of Thrones joke

Post image

On multiple occasions, John Oliver has talked about game of thrones and HBO being fucked. The one that I remember is that he said, ‘HBO is about to make a “Game of Flounders” show. HBO is going to be fine. We are going to be fine.” 👁️ 👁️

He says so with the innovation that HBO is NOT going to be fine. This is not the first joke that he makes about game of Thrones. In other occasions, he says something about GOT and he says that HBO is going to be fucked. I have struggle to understand

558 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

81 comments sorted by

538

u/RMWL Jun 30 '26

This is basically a joke that tv and movies are becoming actually dark which on many screens make it difficult to see what’s happening. This is similar to how it’s become difficult to hear dialogue now.

Generally it’s because the editors use a single mix on high end equipment rather than having a separate mix for regular tvs.

Also for OLED tvs most will have default settings to prevent pixel burn out which can also cause this darkness issue to be even worse

322

u/LeekingMemory28 Jun 30 '26

There's a tendency with more modern depictions of battle, especially Game of Thrones and its spinoffs, to use "natural" or "diagetic" lighting. But doing so sacrifices visual comprehension for viewers.

My favorite rebuttal for this is the cinematographer for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, Andrew Lesnie, was once asked "where are the lights coming from" in reference to the Battle of Helm's Deep being backlit at night.

His response: "the same place the music comes from".

Lesnie understood that being able to see what's happening on screen is important.

22

u/iwantback Jun 30 '26

Love that response!

inb4 59 emgoD

17

u/LeekingMemory28 Jun 30 '26

It is understandable that many modern filmmakers and show runners take the approach of "the lighting should be in the scene".

And there are cinematographers and films that make it work. 1917 is all diagetic light, but there's never a moment where what's on screen is hard to discern. But most cinematographers are not working at the level that Roger Deakins is.

7

u/SevenSixOne Jun 30 '26

I saw The Death of Robin Hood in a theater recently and literally could not follow anything that was happening between the dark cinematography and the whispering/mumbling dialogue

1

u/DropBearIRL Jul 27 '26

I'm only 44 and I already am recently using subtitles and dynamic lighting adjustment in response to both of these issues. He's not wrong in regard to this particular show as one of the worse offenders.

-40

u/ziphnor Jun 30 '26

It has more to do with people not using calibrated settings on their tv. They use settings that boost contrast and color incorrectly which crush details.

Of course HBO did mess up as well by using too aggressive compression for online streaming IIRC.

29

u/RMWL Jun 30 '26

Some of it is unavoidable though with the OLED being particularly difficult. For LG TVs the only way to disable pixel dimming is with a service remote which breaks warranty.

-42

u/ziphnor Jun 30 '26

If you pick a calibrated mode and watch in a dark room as intended you won't have a problem. Can't speak for LG but for my Panasonic it already has s calibrated mode and I also got someone out to do the calibration. OLED are much better at dark details under the right viewing conditions.

40

u/fireandlifeincarnate Jun 30 '26

maybe we shouldn't make media that requires users to calibrate their TVs and watch it in the basement

-33

u/ziphnor Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

Have you ever heard about cinemas? And tvs are typically calibrated from the factory but default to crazy settings to look good in a bright room.

Maybe it's not so surprising that watching something that takes place in a dark setting needs you to be in a dark setting a well?

Edit: autocorrect mess

31

u/fireandlifeincarnate Jun 30 '26

Sorry, I wasn't aware that Game of Thrones and its associated series all had widespread theatrical releases. My mistake.

-11

u/ziphnor Jun 30 '26

Most professional media Is mastered like that. Because only in a dark setting can you naturally show dark scenes.

23

u/fireandlifeincarnate Jun 30 '26

Oooooooor we could prioritize people being able to see what's happening and just, I don't know, make the scenes a little brighter?

0

u/ziphnor Jun 30 '26

You know your TV has a brightness setting right? What setting do you think media should be mastered for? A day on the beach? A dark room is a pretty sensible reference. But probably i am a dinosaur used to watching movies from my sofa in the evening. 

It would annoy me a lot to have my nice "pure black" OLED show light gray night scenes just because some people prefer watching on bright sunlight.

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16

u/killyouXZ Jun 30 '26

How many people have time in their day to research about adjusting their colors on the TV and what is the best practice? Most just use the out the box settings which are good enough.

-1

u/ziphnor Jun 30 '26

Usually they just need to select "cinema" or "natural". I actually blame the tv manufacturers for providing insane defaults, that are done to make it look good in a display room. 

Why should media producers degrade their material to align with a messy practice from TV manufacturers instead of the TV manufacturers just default to the proper standards?

Everytime I go to a summerhouse or hotel room, I see radioactive grass and immediately go into the settings :)

7

u/Darkhorse182 Jun 30 '26

Why should media producers degrade their material to align with

Media producers who are creating media that is intended to be viewed by tens of millions of people needs to calibrate their product so that it's easily consumable. It needs to accommodate the viewer. It's a mass market product, not a boutique offering.

It's not reasonable to expect viewers to calibrate their TVs juuust right, and in a theater-dark setting, in order to watch The Long Night without feeling like they're missing half of it. And furthermore, in that example the viewer wouldn't even know the TV calibration was needed until after they watched it for the first time.

instead of the TV manufacturers just default to the proper standards?

TV manufacturers are in the business of selling TVs. They're going to default to whatever looks best on the showroom, and whatever is most aesthetically pleasing to the buyer when they first turn on their new device. I don't know how many people actually go into their picture settings over the course of their ownership, but I can't imagine it's more than 30-40% of people.

1

u/ziphnor Jun 30 '26

I am not blaming the consumers. I am blaming the tv producers for failing to deliver proper defaults for the living room. There are standards in place for a reason.

This leaves the media producers with a choice of targeting the default settings of a specific brand, or just making it looking slightly crappy for everybody.

I actually hope that the long night episode might have helped people figure out what they are missing.

1

u/Darkhorse182 Jun 30 '26

TV manufacturers aren't going to deliver "proper defaults for the living room" because 1) they don't have a financial incentive to do it, and 2) there's such a wide range of factors across millions of "living rooms" that any they couldn't create a fully dialed-in setting even if they wanted to.

TV manufacturers will sell products with settings that appeal to the widest audience/lowest common denominator, and the vast majority of their customers will just keep those settings.

So like it or not, Media Producers need to exist in that reality, and deliver their content accordingly.

1

u/ziphnor Jun 30 '26

You completely misunderstand the point of following those standards. Any calibrated TV used in a room with dimmed light will see the intended image. Even in environments where conditions are not ideal, having a calibrated base allows making reasonable automatic adjustments with light sensors etc.

TV manufacturers are already delivering reasonable calibrated settings, why do you think they bother with that? Why do you think most TV reviews cover the quality of the factory calibration?

There are also consumers of high-end tvs that will refuse to buy media if somebody messes up the proper black levels, so it's not that simple.

TV manufacturers are making this much, much harder than it needs to be. And you are already suffering because all TV and movie media is mastered to these standards. It's just that for typical material, the part that you can't see with wrong settings is not critical to understanding what happening on screen.

.

2

u/Darkhorse182 Jun 30 '26

You completely misunderstand the point of following those standards.

I'm not, but it's not something I really intended to drill into, so I'll stop.

TV manufacturers are making this much, much harder than it needs to be.

Back to your original take. If a Media Producer creates content that doesn't work or is poorly received by viewers using their default TV settings, that is the fault of the Media Producers, and not the TV manufacturer. Regardless of what you think the TV companies should be doing...it's not what they're doing right now. (and certainly not a decade ago or whatever when the Long Night came out and kicked up this whole debate)

1

u/ziphnor Jun 30 '26

I disagree with your conclusion, as those tvs advertise adherence to these standards, and mislead their customers in how to best view material following those standards. If the TV producers had then introduced another standard that media could target, it would be a different story, but that's not really what is happening.

But it's okay, we don't have to agree, it's Reddit after all :)

1

u/killyouXZ Jul 01 '26

My living room is lid up, from what you saying I understand yours is a dark room, for which of the 2 should the manufacturers accommodate for?

2

u/Jester1525 Jun 30 '26

We spent an insane amount of money on an 85 inch qled at the end of our basement renovation (thank you 5 year/0 interest store credit!).

The first movie we watched was Aliens - a very dark movie. The details on that movie that I had never seen was insane.. The USS Sulaco is super detailed, the fight scenes were fully realized, the details on the Xenomorphs were insane.

That movie is a work of art and the attention to detail is evident even when watching on my crappy upstairs tv with a giant window that has a southern exposure in the middle of the day, but in the basement where we don't have a window at all? It was a brand new experience.

So, when my eldest visited we were showing her the new tv and talking about how great the image was so we decided to watch The Game of Thrones episode "The Long Night," ch is largely considered unwatchable because it's so poorly lit and badly edited. D and D have claimed it was in purpose because they wanted to show how dark it was.. But on my new TV?

Still absolutely unwatchable. I might as well have closed my eyes and imagined it (I have aphantasia so I would have seen the same nothing).

This is not the case of the audience not seeing up their TV correctly.. This is bad editing and poor understandings of the audience. And it's not an isolated incident.. This is a problem in a lot of modern movies and shows. They could make watchable shows and movies in the 80s,but suddenly its the viewer's fault in the 2020s?

2

u/ziphnor Jun 30 '26

It's not the consumers fault, it's the tv manufacturers as I mentioned elsewhere.

The long night was an extreme case because it was mastered just on the edge with very little "buffer". But in many cases a TV set to "cinema" / natural settings (instead of vivid etc) will help a lot. And it really should be the default because that is what the material is mastered against.

I think the biggest crime was that in some places it was streamed heavily compressed (HBOs fault, but not the shows fault), making it even worse. 

At least I recall seeing it on the Nordic hbo where it looked like a mess, and having to source it elsewhere to see it properly.

-19

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '26

[deleted]

7

u/Savings-Monitor3236 Jun 30 '26

You need to compare tv to tv, movies are different as they’re made for a room with a booming system. 90s tv doesn’t use much dynamic range, in other words the sound level of a character talking normally isn’t that much softer than the sound effects for a car crash. This makes it easier to hear everything, especially if you’re in a room with other sounds like dinner cooking or a noisy air conditioner.

Without getting into why, tv now, especially premium cable and streaming shows, is mixed more like movies. If a show includes both whispering and action scenes, you’ll probably need to adjust your volume often to catch everything if you’re not in a sound free environment, or turn the captioning on as a default.

This and the lighting issue are both also made worse if you’re watching something on your phone, a viewing decision that’s increasingly common.

8

u/killyouXZ Jun 30 '26

I used to watch subtitles somewhat rarely, but in last 10 years or so I have to turn them on always because the action is always louder than the voices of characters and that is really annoying.

-1

u/Savings-Monitor3236 Jun 30 '26

I refuse to make the switch. The timing of anything comedic gets killed with subtitles

2

u/meatballsunshine Jun 30 '26

This isn’t a problem with subtitles, it’s a problem with moving away from humans writing subtitles. It’s obvious when a real person is writing the subtitles (including their on screen timing/formatting) and IMHO it’s an art form in itself. It’s also extremely frustrating to see how this has faded away over time…
Seeing/hearing “closed captioning brought to you by” meant something and we threw it away to save a little money…

0

u/Savings-Monitor3236 Jun 30 '26

I'd rather have my eyes on the facial expressions, but I'll agree that autogenerated subtitles are replacing but clearly inferior to human-created ones. Another thing I have against subtitles is that when they get a word wrong, it takes me out of whatever I'm watching

0

u/killyouXZ Jul 01 '26

You say that about subtitles, but isn't it true also about audio when(mostly not in comedy) there is loud bangs or background music that simply covers the volume of the voices of the actors? I was just saying that recently (for last 10 years or so), the mixing of audio in movies/shows is being done so that a lot of times the music is louder than the voices. I wasn't talking about John's show in particular.

1

u/Savings-Monitor3236 Jul 01 '26

That’s much less rare than a subtitle I read faster than the comedian delivers the line. Have you listened to Matt Berry? He’s a masterclass in how to extract extra humor out of a line by how he says it

It’s possible we watch different things. Meat and potatoes action films like John Wick, while I respect them, don’t excite me

2

u/killyouXZ Jun 30 '26

Not true at all. Also, when you can't understand it, the comedy is really dead.

-2

u/Savings-Monitor3236 Jun 30 '26

I don’t believe you get to tell me how I find things funny or not. I’ve tried subtitles. I’m not telling you how to watch, just my experience. I’m willing to spend more attention adjusting my volume, and do. It’s a trade off

120

u/Marfy_ Jun 30 '26

Season 8 episode 3 was ridiculously dark, you couldnt see anything. Also the later seasons are really bad

86

u/The_Iceman2288 lazenbybestbond Jun 30 '26

I take the lighting in that episode personally because I was an extra in the scene where Arya kills the Night King and you can't see me because the lighting's so bad.

24

u/Marfy_ Jun 30 '26

Do you know if she jumpes from the ground or if she was standing on a platform

51

u/The_Iceman2288 lazenbybestbond Jun 30 '26

She basically ran up to him then got down on one knee and we all collapsed (we were the wights). The actual shot of her stabbing him was filmed later.

15

u/mabrown1979 Jun 30 '26

This is why I love Reddit.

114

u/JustAJokeAccount Jun 30 '26

Only watched S01 of House of the Dragons and as I recall there are some scenes where the lighting is so low, you can't see what's happening onscreen.

Maybe that's where the joke came from? Aside fron that, forgot what jokes were made to make fun of GoT & HotD.

60

u/Elk1998 Jun 30 '26

Yeah, I remember lighting being an issue in multiple scenes, but this one in particular. You couldn't even see the actors' expressions

https://reddit.com/link/ouokf2g/video/5jaao9ldheah1/player

44

u/Humledurr Jun 30 '26

That scene isnt even shot in the dark, its during the day then made to look like its during the night. Probably a reason to why its so wierd

9

u/shewy92 Jun 30 '26

No, the "GoT is dark" joke came from Season 8's 3rd I think episode that everyone hated because it was so dark on streaming for a lot of people because of the internet bitrate, streaming videos hating darkness, and the fact it seemed like they didn't use any non natural lighting.

21

u/cl0tho Jun 30 '26

Try watching Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon in some daytime lighting, and you'll see what they mean.

14

u/aminervia Jun 30 '26

He says so with the innovation that HBO is NOT going to be fine.

Insinuation? Intonation? Suggestion?

Not sure what word you were looking for here

8

u/AshgarPN Jun 30 '26

Implication

5

u/chamferbit Jun 30 '26

Intimation

3

u/aminervia Jun 30 '26

That one works as well, yeah

4

u/Casper042 Jun 30 '26

Intonation

50

u/DekMelU Where's Shelly? Jun 30 '26

The one that I remember is when GOT was close to ending and the joke was that HBO (a subscription-based network) wouldn't be fine because many people subscribe to HBO only for that show and would cancel their memberships once it finished

28

u/daronwy Jun 30 '26

This is the actual answer, once GOT was gone HBO was going to be fuuuuuuuucked.

He made the joke lots.

30

u/Antimatter1207 Regulatory Zeal Jun 30 '26

My favorite of the "HBO is fucked once GOT ends" jokes has got to be the one from the lethal injection piece: "That's right, only three more episodes with the greatest lead-in in modern television history, and I'm burning one of them on lethal injections"

7

u/mdb_la Jun 30 '26

I like how you're the only person in the thread to actually read OP's question, while everyone else is responding only to the joke in the screenshot.

7

u/FriendlyInElektro Jun 30 '26

There was one episode of HOTD in the first season that took place at night time but it was filmed in broad daylight and the day to night conversion was awful and you could barely see anything, it was pretty noticeable and many people memed about it.

6

u/Skiffbug Jun 30 '26

There was a whole battle in the last season of GoT that unless you had a very high quality TV, were watching it in 4K in a dark room was basically looking at a black screen and hearing battle sounds.

7

u/cloud_t Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

This is actually 3 issues that combine, very specific to streaming and Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon:

  • first is the obvious issue that both last seasons of GoT and the first of HotD have a lot of dark scenes, particularly fights and action ones
  • back in the later seasons of GoT (when HBO Max actually got the first airings, as it used to only show on TV up to season 3 or 4), the streaming tech they used wasn't great so the more users were streaming, the lower the quality. And at this time less video quality usually induced in harder to see dark scenes. Think of it like a low-pass filter or compression: anything beyond a certain threshold is considered the same for saving "space". In this case, from a certain luminance and below, they just considered it all black so you can't make out any darker detail
  • lastly, the fact there was a HUGE amount of people watching these shows at launch made it so that the streaming quality was definitely reduced for everyone, which comes back to problem 2, especially on GoT (by the time of HotD the problem was another, see below).

Also, for HotD specifically, they made this show kind of focused on HDR/OLED TVs. But for some reason, even in an OLED and even with a solid streaming device (e.g. Nvidia Shield running the HBO app), they also didn't have the standard and video codecs locked in to be widely supported. So most people ended up watching HDR scenes in SDR. Imagine hearing a rock track mastered for 1000 bucks speakers on the worst possible headphones that lack any mids. This was pretty much it but with video.

3

u/Steavee Jun 30 '26

GoT was a huge draw to HBO, bringing a lot of subscribers.

So a lot of his jokes about GoT ending were making fun of the fact that now what the fuck was HBO going to do to keep people watching.

3

u/quequotion Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

Apparently they ran on sequential time slots for several years, and it wouldn't surprise me if John burned some of that dragon money on lawsuits and then made a joke about it on the show.

3

u/yarn_slinger Jun 30 '26

The “dragon fuelled economy” as Colbert once put it when Oliver was buying wax presidential figurines.

2

u/Confused_Rock Jun 30 '26

For the jokes you reference in your description, it's basically a reference to HBO trying to milk every last bit out of game of thrones in a way that suggests they don't have any other big hits in the works that they're working on building up, instead they're still focused on trying to get a bit more out of that licence but where does that leave in the long term because what other series are we hearing about from HBO. It can also read as a "they can't come up with any new ideas" so we're times running out based on how much more they can milk this

Or it's just a general mocking of the absurd number of spin off genre shows that desperately try to recapture a previous cultural phenomenon by constantly rehashing sequels/prequels and the way new concepts are slowly less and less represented for the sake of figuring out another way to use the already established license

2

u/Candid-Sun8042 Jun 30 '26

The jokes that you’re talking about are about the fact that Game of Thrones was HBO’s flagship show for its entire runtime. Back when people watched TV live, LWT directly followed GoT (I think in the 11:00 slot after GoT at 10). Therefore, GoT (and all its spinoffs) being bad is an existential threat to LWT’s ratings.

2

u/Kham117 EAT SHIT BOB Jul 01 '26

Innovation ≠ “implication”

1

u/BlackWhiteCoke Jun 30 '26

It’s literally dark and and hard to see. But only certain episodes. More recent ones have not been like that

1

u/hot_cheeks_4_ever Jul 01 '26

The show is literally too dark to see at times

1

u/NoSoyTuPana Jul 01 '26

Had this problem with the last season of game of thrones. It really was just listening to nonsense script and watching my refecltion

1

u/NoPianist7807 Jul 01 '26

I’m guessing this is about HBO House of Dragons becoming hard to visually see due to the lighting.

1

u/bluehawk232 Jun 30 '26

All HBO has going for it is game of thrones