House of the Dragon is a brilliant, cutting show, but it’s getting increasingly hard to press play on new episodes.

During the 2010s, we embraced an era of ‘cozy TV’. The lovable Parks and Recreation was still riding The Office’s mockumentary coattails, The Good Place was pumping out a blend of feel-good comedy and existential crises, and it wouldn’t be long before Abbott Elementary folded us back into the familiar territory of crash zooms, slow burns, and ensemble casts in 2021.

But comfort food television, once the universally beloved king of storytelling, has somewhat been usurped by new TV shows that are the tonal opposite: series where brutality, cynicism, and edge are the bread and butter.

You need only look at what ones have trended recently – House of the Dragon, The Boys, Succession – to see the well-earned popularity shift. Morally grey characters, R-rated humor, and plenty of gore and nudity is a confident formula to win over that propelling 16-25-year-old crowd.

They’re perpetually in my backlog

Sometimes, I want to hop on the bandwagons and ride them till the end, mainly because they are deservedly lauded.

The Boys, which I consider quitting every two to three business days, always reels me back in with a twist or mopey Billy Butcher moment; I find Alicent Hightower too tragically fascinating to ignore House of the Dragon Season 2; and I watched seven addictive seasons of The Walking Dead before the show itself became an animated corpse.

But inevitably, they drive me away. Like avoiding a toxic friend who starts every coffee catch-up by rattling off the worst parts of their week, I’m instinctively recoiling to protect my inner peace.

We’re living in… wait for it… unprecedented times, and sometimes finishing a grating day and tuning into the Game of Thrones universe is asking a little too much.

Comfort binge-watching and beheadings don’t go together

Perhaps I’m chasing that ill-advised comfort zone. The one where you rewatch Leslie Knope’s rise to high office for the sixth time instead of taking a chance on new episodes of The Boys – no amount of biting satire can dull the sting of how powerless we are in a world bursting at the seams with climate anxiety and war.

Similarly, I started Succession twice and stopped twice. The acting was excellent, the production value was sublime, and the quality of the writing was humbling. Still, I had to talk myself into watching it.

Whether it was the influx of detestable characters in my nightly routine or having to learn about the inner workings of board rooms, I never felt drawn to it the way I wanted to.

I felt I had a duty, though, because everyone else was on board; it was winning Emmys, and it was the caliber of stuff real adults watch. Turn off Real Housewives and get serious about those frown lines, solider.

Fiction shouldn’t pander to us. When people complain about sad endings, how they ‘deserve’ fan service, etc., I advise they should consume media like a toddler would: under close supervision, warned of every potential upset, lest they have to be carried out of the cinema by mommy and daddy.

We’re living in a time of great denial because it’s easier to bury your head in the sand and take solace in what’s familiar. But whether it’s from entitlement or a subconscious, myopic desire to be soothed, aversion to TV that leans ‘mean’ might partially be caused by a waning tolerance for distressing images and stories.

We’re becoming numb to shock value

Audiences naturally tire of anything that relies too heavily on cyclical shock value. The Walking Dead, for example, was an unprecedented success at its height for the same reasons that eventually drove hordes of fans away.

The predictable loop of getting attached to a character only to see them torn apart, a lack of hope in the universe to motivate people to finish it, and the stomach-churning knowledge its world was too barbaric for anyone to get out unscathed hindered it.

Millions of viewers dropped it like a hot potato after Glenn’s brains were bashed in by Negan’s bat, wrapped in barbed wire for extra gory effect.

There can be too much of a good thing, as further evidenced by The Boys’ ‘we’re not your dad’s superhero TV show’ moments starting to wear thin. Once something has proved itself biting and extreme, attempts to further reinforce that come across a bit try-hard.

House of the Dragon Season 2 promised bloodshed, and it delivered

The Blood and Cheese mini-arc is not innocent in this, either. Knowing fans would be arguing over whether toddlers deserved to be murdered (peruse the #HOTD tag at your own risk) and actively cheering on the bloodshed reminded me I don’t share much in common with the average Game of Thrones die-hard.

Violence, tragedy, and bleakness are valuable to certain stories, and I respect their inclusion, to an extent.

I first fell in love with cinema because Mulholland Drive enveloped me in its sickly, disorientating world. I have a slightly embarrassing Donnie Darko tattoo on my arm because its particular brand of ‘fuck everything’ spoke to me as a teenager, and The Last of Us 2 is a masterpiece because it left me in critical condition (emotionally).

But when execution treads gratuitous waters and things feel excessive for the sake of it, or are included to maintain the image of a brand, the result is a desensitized viewer who might fail to engage with other elements, because they’re here for the loud, extremities you’ve trained them to expect.

Dark is fun, but not all the time

For some people, this kind of storytelling can be cathartic. I know many gamers who find Doom’s unyielding combat therapeutic and film fans who love the torture porn in the Saw movies.

Personally, I’m gritting my teeth to avoid embarrassing myself in front of my gore-hound date and walking for 60 hours in Death Stranding instead.

If in the headspace for gloom and doom, something like House of the Dragon hits the spot. But typically, I need something else to hold onto. I used to think that potentially made me soft, or that I wasn’t engaging with mature content properly.

These days, it’s more like a confident reflection I know what type of fiction I enjoy best: work with more tonal variation than two ends of an equally morally corrupt Green and Black spectrum.

I also understand that these kinds of shows work better for me when I pace them out, and meet them on my own terms instead of feeling pressured to jump onto whatever TV is the topic of the week on social media.

Consuming them in a bubble with more time and space usually allows me to analyze what I’m watching better, and without the bias other takes online force on you. 

So, I’ll watch Season 2 eventually, maybe…

For more coverage on TV shows streaming, check out The Boys most shocking moments, The Bear Season 3 soundtrack, or our guide to the Seven Kingdoms.