It's Officially The Start Of An Era For High Fantasy
Angel Shaw is a Lead Writer and Critic on ScreenRant's TV team, covering new-release and classic TV shows across all major streaming platforms. She has been a writer with ScreenRant since 2022 and specializes in Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and fantasy.
Angel holds a bachelor's degree in language interpreting and is passionate about all things culture and communication—especially in how it relates to popular media throughout history (from Shakespeare to Friends to Game of Thrones).
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The fantasy genre has entered into an intriguing new era, effectively changing the television landscape for the foreseeable future. Like anything else, the entertainment industry goes through endless cycles in terms of what is popular or common. A specific genre, format, or concept becomes a hit, and anything we see on screens seems to align with that understanding. There's no question that the high fantasy genre has always been popular in the world of film, but it hasn't always held a solid place on television—that is, until Game of Thrones.
Fantasy TV shows tended to lean more toward the monster-of-the-week format of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural before Game of Thrones hit the scene in 2011. The concepts of expansive fantasy worlds filled with unique races or beasts and ruled by kings and queens had been around forever, but the sort of necessary budget for these projects just wasn't typical for small screens. It took developing technology and a project like Game of Thrones to demonstrate the benefits of fantasy TV, and things took off.
Game of Thrones has successfully expanded into two spinoff TV shows so far, House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Prime Video first premiered The Wheel of Time TV show and later premiered The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Netflix's flagship high-fantasy offering was The Witcher. It was a whole lot nearly all at once, and there's a whole lot still to come. There's plenty of reason to be excited about this, of course, but what is truly interesting is why high fantasy has such a grip these days.
High Fantasy Is The Most Important Genre On TV Right Now
More high fantasy TV projects are currently in the works, including an Apple TV adaptation of Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere universe, Prime Video's Fourth Wing and God of War, and Disney+'s Eragon TV show. It's easy enough to look at this lineup and attribute the influx of high fantasy projects to Game of Thrones' success, and that certainly wouldn't be an incorrect assumption. Still, it's worth considering what high fantasy offers TV audiences compared to other genres that has made it so mainstream in the modern landscape.
The whole idea of fantasy is escapism, but shows like Game of Thrones don't exactly take viewers to a magical world of wonder and hope. Instead, this series places us into the middle of a political nightmare—far from a traditional escape. Still, we are so gripped by this reality because it explores some of the most frightening concepts and impulses we can imagine and plays them out within a hypothetical. This isn't a world that looks anything like ours, which makes it far easier to imagine the worst moral choices actually playing out.
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings set the standard for high fantasy's exploration of real-world morality. He took the concepts of good and evil in their simplest forms and put them within a world completely outside our general understanding. There, we can leave behind the messiness of our existence and examine heroism and villainy under a microscope in a controlled environment. In many ways, the creativity of The Lord of the Rings is a coping mechanism, and television is now offering up plenty more in more complex ways.
Before the new world Game of Thrones introduced, it was the sci-fi genre that led the charge in drawing viewers through moral and political hypotheticals. Going back to The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, this genre has used hypotheticals to imagine society's trajectory. The work is continued by heavy-hitting shows like Black Mirror and Severance, which further explore how current societal norms and technology might continue to shape our world. The trouble here is that much of this is rooted in true reality. For better or worse, high fantasy gives us a break from that. In this new era, perhaps exploring morality without reality is precisely what we need.
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