Dear Gossips,
We are finally inside a week until the return – and end – of Game of Thrones. Next Monday we’ll all be talking about the first of the last six episodes, “the end of the era of television as an epic, communal journey”, as Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in Vulture the other day. Will there ever be a show this big that we all watch together, week after week? It does seem unlikely. There may be single events that we watch together, at the same time, but a series like Game of Thrones, which pulled in over 32 million viewers in season 7, many people don’t think that’s ever going to happen again. What we’ll experience in the next six weeks then, that sense of TV community, is what future generations may never know. Let’s cherish this time we have together.
In that spirit, every day this week leading up to the premiere, we’ll be posting about our all-time favourite GoT episodes. Prem is up first today. What quickly became obvious, at least to me, when we were making our picks, was that each of our choices say more about us, really, than the show. Kathleen and Maria, for example, are self-described “basics”, LOL. Duana is all about Littlefinger and Tyrion, politicking and manipulation. Sarah, of course, is going for the throat. On brand. All our selections are on brand. Please let us know through the week what you think of our featured episodes – and what your favourite episodes are. I’d like to do a post about that too with some of your feedback.
Changing lanes now because there were two things I wanted to talk about in this space – Game of Thrones and….BLACKPINK! I first wrote about my obsession with BLACKPINK last July, after they hit us with the video for “Ddu-du Ddu-du” (D4). They were my whole sh-t this weekend with the release of the “Kill This Love” video which just set the YouTube record for fastest video to 100 million views and broke the record for highest first day YouTube views previously held by Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next”. A third of those views are probably mine and Sasha’s. We texted back and forth yesterday about this like teenagers. “OMG whyyyyyy are they so cool, can we please be them?”
BLACKPINK will become the first all-female K-pop group to play Coachella this weekend, two days after BTS releases their new album, Map of the Soul: PERSONA, and a day after BTS is the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. So how much longer do we have to keep calling it “K-pop” instead of what it’s becoming, which is straight up popular music, period?
Yours in gossip,
Lainey