The Collective Journey Comes to Television
Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Orange is the New Black & Others are Subverting the Hero’s Journey
At the end of Season One of Game of Thrones, Ned Stark, the noble and just Lord of Winterfell (and closest thing to a hero the series had to offer) was shockingly beheaded at the whim of amoral sadist putz, Joffrey Baratheon. An audience of millions suddenly realized that this was no ordinary fantasy story. No one was coming to save the day.
In the entertainment space, Game of Thrones is an example of an emerging form of storytelling we call Collective Journey.
Game of Thrones abandons the mannered stages of epic quest stories like The Lord of the Rings. Instead, we are introduced to a raft of complex characters, exotic locations, and interlocking conflicts, slowly being driven toward catastrophe, because of deep flaws in the system by which everyone lives.
We empathize with the characters—even the awful ones—because we understand the system. Money, power, sex, avarice, an elite class over which we have little or no influence. The system is ours.
What’s fascinating about Game of Thrones is that we are not told right from wrong. The audience is made privy to dozens of differing points of view about how the world works, and what needs to be done about it. Equal weight is given to the perspectives of women characters (at least the major ones), poor characters, gays, exiles, and immigrants. Ask anyone watching who’s “side” they’re on, and they’ll name a different character.
You can argue that the series is just an exceptional soap opera; that we’ve seen its like before. But if we look closely, there is a deeper design to the show. Anyone can die, even the most heroic. Mentors get it wrong. Women are key players. The plot is anything but linear, and deeply complicated. The violence is repulsive and inglorious.
All of these seem to be intentional subversions of the common tropes of the Campbellian Hero’s Journey that film and television writers have been using for nearly a century. That makes Game of Thrones something new. But it’s not alone.
Although Rick Grimes is positioned by AMC network marketers as the hero of The Walking Dead, he often strays from the classic Hero’s Journey path. He fades from the forefront for many episodes at a time. He is often lost and near delirious with anguish. He’s failed to save the day nearly as many times as he’s rescued his compatriots. He vanishes before the story’s end.
Instead, the living denizens of the world of The Walking Dead must wander in circles, grappling with a deeply broken system. The system has generated any number of antagonists, but they are always portrayed as people responsible for their own collectives, who must decide how much of their own humanity to sacrifice in order to persist.
So, rather than the polarity of good and evil, The Walking Dead (and its various transmedia extensions) offers us moral relativism. Its energy comes as much from the feminine as the masculine. Its violence is not celebrated, but depicted as stomach-churning and emotionally wrenching. All of these are traits we are finding in the Collective Journey.
Orange is the New Black tricked us. We thought we were getting a serio-comedy about a blond blue-eyed naif trying to navigate her way through a prison full of frightening criminals. What we got was a community of prisoners, guards, and bureaucrats all grappling with an increasingly dangerous, dysfunctional system. Creator Jenji Kohan admitted as much:
“In a lot of ways Piper was my Trojan Horse. You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories.”
As early as the series’ second season, Piper began to step back into the ensemble, a diverse community where the actions of any character can ripple across the prison, impacting any number of others. Orange is the New Black stopped pretending it was a Hero’s Journey story, and started to behave like a Collective Journey narrative.
Netflix, in fact, has been a bastion of Collective Journey shows. During a consultation where we pointed out how often these traits arose in the streaming service’s programming, one producer’s response was fascinating:
“It stands to reason that some of our biggest and most talked about hits are Collective Journey type stories. Our shows need to be accessible all over the world, so the characters need to have a multitude of valid perspectives with which very different audience members can identify. Because our shows tend to be longer, more thematically complex and novelistic, we’re less interested in simply good-evil conflicts. We want to see whether our characters can surmount their differences, however extreme, and repair their worlds.”
There are other TV story worlds that reflect many of the traits of the Collective Journey: Westworld, Euphoria, Steven Universe, The Deuce, The Good Place, and Pose are examples. But what they all have in common is a strikingly simple message:
NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU.
These stories are not about the glorious eternal return of heroes. They are about communities struggling to achieve efficacy through the power of their own diversity.
Hero’s Journey stories are about how the individual actualizes by achieving personal change, but Collective Journey stories are about how communities actualize in their attempt to achieve systemic change.
These stories tell us that if we are awaiting a savior, we are consigning ourselves to doom, and to erect one in his place can be just as bad. We, collectively, must become our own salvation.
Finally, in the narratives of all these shows, it becomes clear that systemic challenges cannot truly be resolved by one side soundly defeating all others, or by one side solving the crisis by themselves. As illustrated even by the controversial conclusion of Game of Thrones, to attempt to do so at the expense of all others could well have been…apocalyptic.
Next: The Collective Journey takes on remarkable force when we observe it in the stories told by corporations and their brands. The tale is no longer just their’s to tell.
The Collective Journey Series:
Intro: Why is This Happening?
A New Narrative Model Explains it
Part 1: The Hero’s Journey is No Longer Serving Us
Classic Storytelling Models Are Faltering in the Digital Age
Part 2: When It Comes to Story, You’re Not Getting It
The Drama & Disquiet of Old-Fashioned Storytelling
Part 3: The Collective Journey Story Model Comes to Television
Thrones, Dead, Orange & Others Are Subverting the Hero’s Journey
Part 4: Big Brands and the Awakening of the Docile Consumer
In the Collective Journey the Peoples’ Voice Now Levels the Playing Field
Part 5: Story Can Assert Control Over the Masses
The Power of Propaganda & Multilateral Narratives
Part 6: Regenerative Listening
Collective Journey Narratives Require Genuine Engagement
Part 7: Superpositioning
Each of Us Can Now Be in Five Places at Once
Part 8: Social Self-Organization
Story Can Take What We Imagine and Make It Real
Special thanks to Alan Berkson for his valued editorial input.
