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Binge-watching is a night out, even when you spend the whole day in. It’s a way of being.All the same, like anybody both adult and sane, I had no intention of watching “Game of Thrones,” even though the whole world was already talking about it. But, one afternoon when I was alone, I found myself taking a peep. Almost the first thing I saw was Sean Bean gritting his entire face, and then there was a blond princess caressing a trio of dragon eggs. Yet I kept on watching, even as I vowed to stop when the eggs hatched. What was the immediate appeal?......This is where Sean Bean as Eddard (Ned) Stark, Warden of the North, newly appointed to be the King’s Hand, graduates from his established condition of dispensability to the same indispensability that he enjoyed in “Sharpe,” and then, while the old King slowly dies, goes on to a postgraduate degree as the wise man, the unwobbling pivot of the plot. And then what? He gets his head cut off at the mere whim of Cersei’s frightful son, the boy king Joffrey.......The real shock is not in what Joffrey’s evil streak can accomplish but in what Ned Stark’s virtue fails to prevent. He is a good, thoughtful man with a sense of justice, and it avails him nothing. It avails us nothing, either, who have come to depend on him........ But Sean Bean, though he might be admired, has never counted among the much loved, and the shock value of his departure from “Game of Thrones” depended on the size of the investment that the creators had put into building up his part of the story until it looked like the armature of the whole deal. For them, it was a key play in a deliberate campaign to get their show beyond the reach of movie cliché, and even beyond the reach of show business itself. Show business usually depends on fulfilling our wishes. In King’s Landing, however, our wishes might run out of luck.
