I find that very surprising to hear.
Why would that surprise you? Is it because it's set in a fictional kingdom instead of a fictional advertising firm?
The artistic merit of the program is top-notch. It's consistently among the top contenders at the award shows and several members of the cast have received awards or nominations for their portrayals. The production values are among the best ever put on television... a season of Game of Thrones is comparable to a ten-hour long Hollywood blockbuster. The characters are complex and richly drawn, and we've watched them grow and evolve over the course of six seasons. The writing delivers unmatched suspense... the series has shown that they're completely unafraid to kill characters that you're emotionally invested in, and when characters find themselves in perilous situations the audience is fully aware that the cavalry might not arrive to save them.
Game of Thrones didn't develop a huge and almost obsessive fan following by being lukewarm. Several episodes of this program have become infamous for the intense emotional reaction they caused viewers. Some episodes I have watched almost entirely without sitting down, instead pacing anxiously around my living-room, dreading the outcome. Some events on the show have left me so stunned that I felt hollow for hours afterwards. And just once in a while, something incredibly beautiful and wonderful happens.
Yes, absolutely it's one of the most deeply affecting and sometimes disturbing things I've seen. It can deliver an emotional punch in the gut like no other program I've ever seen, and only a few movies compare. Without question.
And yet I have this hunch that you feel all of this could be greatly improved if it was set in an advertising firm.
Perhaps it could be called "Game of Ads" or ... "Corner Office". How about "Corner Office". Ned Stark and Cersei Lannister could be reimagined as rival Vice Presidents instead of medeival lords and ladies. Rather than Cersei Lannister plotting to get Ned Stark beheaded, Sarah Lancaster plots to sabotage Ed Stark's big ad campaign and cost him that big promotion that he's been angling for. Is that the thinking? That this would be more compelling, because it's a Real Situation
tm? Except it's not very compelling, and it's not very real either.
yes... 'just'... LOL
My point is that it is a matter of execution, completely independent of genre.
Why would I, as a viewer, be more likely to empathize or identify with a fictional advertising executive than a fictional lord? Why would I as a viewer feel more emotionally invested in a fictional drug-lab operator than a fictional lord?
We're getting into the realm of personal taste again, which isn't a productive conversation, but I would say objectively the less you have to suspend disbelief the less escapist the genre is. I just thought that up now, but let's try that idea on for size.
I disagree.
I think I've mentioned before that I do creative writing. More as a hobby than in any hope that I'm going to ever get published. Regardless, I've got hundreds of pages of work in various unpublished novels, novellas, short stories, and so-on, in several different genres.
The first major epic I embarked upon was a tale of supernatural and the occult set in London in the 1870s. I posted chapters to a creative writing group I belonged to for feedback from other writers. I got excoriated for mistakes in English slang. I got reamed for anachronisms. I got roasted for getting London geography wrong. I got not a word of criticism for having a narrator who is a cat (actually a woman's mind trapped in a cat's body, not that that's any more sensible) and no complaints about the depiction of the occult.
Another of my efforts is about a 20-something woman who dreams of becoming a big rock star, and her struggles with her family and her band and a stalker... it's the closest thing I've attempted to a "real" setting. Once again, lots of complaints that I've screwed up geography (I set it in Phoenix AZ for some reason) and complaints about inaccuracies regarding music equipment and technique and what practicing with a band is actually like.
Your audience is willing to cut you plenty of slack when it comes to depicting a fantasy or science fiction setting. Trying to depict "real" is real hard. If your audience is 6 seasons deep in Game of Thrones, they're not going to stop and say "hey, come on, dragons aren't real." If they're watching the show at all, they've already bought into your premise and they're ok with it, as long as you stay consistent.
As a viewer, I strongly feel that the shows that push your willingness to suspend disbelief the hardest aren't science fiction or fantasy. It's shows that purport to depict realism but utterly fail that are the toughest to suspend disbelief. The computer technology fails on espionage shows that depict "hacking", or the science fails on forensic dramas like CSI, for example. I have never tried watching an episode of House MD in a room full of doctors, but I have watched an episode of CSI with engineers. They would have let Doc Brown talk about his Flux Capacitor all day, but the howls of laughter as the CSI guys discussed the possibility that the dead guy might have been electrocuted by his TV remote control made me feel quite silly for even watching it.
There's no such thing as magic or dragons, so you can't "get it wrong", and your audience knows that and they're willing to buy in to the story you want to tell them. But if you're setting out to depict "real", you can definitely "get it wrong", and when you do fail, it is immersion-breaking for your audience.
-k