El Bastardo
Literary elitist
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- Jan 24, 2005
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"A huge chunk?" I don't know, I don't have their financials in front of me.
Would any scenes, expository or not, take some chunk of the budget? Well, yes. Extra scenes for extra episodes would make for a change in contracts of the necessary actors/actresses, one, and neither you nor I know how the contracts were written or for how long. While they could do contracts per season, they might also have done contracts for the series with the understanding of ten-episode seasons. Beyond that, we're looking at budgetary concerns for set, whether the scenes are done on-location or on green screen. We're looking at continued costume costs, costs of extras, operational expenses of production crews, their equipment, moving equipment, food, drink, etc.
Would it all amount to "a huge chunk?" I don't know. But if we assume their overall budget is not going to change - if it does, both the HBO and BBC need to decide to pay in more, and at that point their profits don't look quite as good, and I'll just point out that Rome never fared too well with 13-episode seasons and a ginormous budget to match - then these extra expenses do have to come out of somewhere. Where would you have them come from? Yes, you now have to decide what to detract from in order to prioritize something else.
The funny thing is, for all the talk that the second season is so much bigger and more complicated than the first, the source material is only about 60 pages longer in the hardcover publication. It's not significantly longer, and it's really not more complicated - there might be new characters introduced, but that should really go without saying in most things. I say it's not more complicated because we've now been introduced to the setting, the ideas, and most of the major players. By comparison, the first book and season are more mysterious because we need to discover everything the way Ned does. In the second season, sure, the most mysterious person is Melisandre, probably, but just because we don't figure her out doesn't necessarily equate to her needing more screentime. Then we have Stannis and Renly, only kind-of in the latter case, but they're just variances on ego.
Your not caring for certain characters might be nothing more than subjective in nature - you just don't care, regardless, you're very "meh" about them - or by design, from the source material. To be fair, one does not have to care for or about the characters in a story, but you usually don't see this as much with the smaller, centralized casts of typical television and film as you do in writing, regardless of "cast" size. It's a matter of sympathy vs. empathy that works in writing but does not carry over quite as well to the visual medium. We see people there, and so we want to be made to care for them, even if the idea backing them is it doesn't matter that we, or if we, care about them.
So yes, I know, the easy response here - and I'm not saying you yourself would respond this way, but it's general - is to say I have a better understanding because I've read the books. And to that point, yes, I know everything that's going to happen up to the fifth book and character motivations and who-said-what. But I have to look at the show as a different beast entirely, because it is. Stuff's going to change. It's an adaptation. The second season already proves this, given the howling-for-murder cries of so many "fans." The second season is not without faults or missteps just on a general production basis, but even with the changes and the shuffles it doesn't vary that much from the source material where the characters, and their major beats, are concerned.
