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" Season three of Game of Thrones, which premieres this Sunday, will have 257 named characters according to HBO. I cannot think of any television show, in history, that even comes close to that number. I suspect that only a few nineteenth-century novels approach the mark, even War and Peace, even In Search of Lost Time. It&amp;#039;s an immense number of bodies, enough to fill two completely stuffed New York City subway cars. It&amp;#039;s going to make Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon a lot easier, especially among actors with rural English accents. But Game of Thrones has always been about scale. It&amp;#039;s a uniquely diffuse show, one that at least since season one has not focused on the classic protagonist/antagonist structure of most television, but in an elaborately created world. It&amp;#039;s not so much a show you follow as a show you get swallowed by. The new season of Game of Thrones begins exactly where it left off. Winterfell has lost the war and the Lannisters are triumphant. But how much do you care about the details? Everyone says that you need to have seasons one and two before season three, but I don&amp;#039;t think so. Just go ahead and jump in. The show combines a sophisticated and beautifully shot narrative maintaining a vastly conceived, intricate pattern of diverging and converging plot streams but it is also very, very simple. It amounts to three things: court intrigue, sword fights, and whores. It may be the purest escapism ever devised. We live in a time of period shows, where every decade of the twentieth century as well as most of the ancient world has been turned into a contemporary entertainment. The Medieval period is the one exception, but that&amp;#039;s only because there have been so many ways of retelling those stories without retelling them directly. J.R.R. Tolkein&amp;#039;s work, and everything that flowed out of it, borrows heavily from the legends of the Anglo-Saxon literature he adored and chronicles from the Middle Ages. He cooled down those terribly brutal stories so that there was less slaughtering of actual Moors and incest, and upped the number of dwarves and elves. It was one of the most powerful narrative tricks of the twentieth century and continues its run into the twenty-first: The Hobbit has already grossed over a billion dollars. Tolkein&amp;#039;s roommate CS Lewis did much the same in the Narnia series, stealing from Medieval story cycles with similarily massive success. But Game of Thrones is the most reductive. It takes everything you want out from Medieval Europe and leaves no trace of the origin. Escapist art can be as revealing as engaged art, in a way. What escapism shows is what we want to escape from and what we want to escape into. Game of Thrones is so pleasurable exactly because it saves us from the complications of our own moment. The trick is in the title. It turns power into a game, and not just through the court intrigue. Some have claimed to find sexism and racism in the show, but they&amp;#039;re really missing the point that the sex and race in the show are deliberately outlandish. I don&amp;#039;t think that Game of Thrones&amp;#039; viewers wish they lived in such a world. They want to escape momentarily into a world that is crude but is also grand because everything in the real world is cheaply made and disposable, and complicated. In the second episode of season three, two of the 257 named characters in the show watch ships passing. The two women make up stories about who might be in the ships, where they might be going. One of them happens to know about one of the voyagers and offers a real story. The other girl won&amp;#039;t hear of it. She wants make-believe. &amp;quot;Everything true is either boring or evil,&amp;quot; she says. Exactly. That&amp;#039;s why we need Game of Thrones. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a21199/game-of-thrones-season-3/>