Game of Thrones premieres on CCTV, viewers call it an edited ‘mess’
Chinese fans are quick to criticise a Putonghua dub and several noticeably missing scenes
China’s national broadcaster began airing the popular television series Game of Thrones on Sunday in an edited format that drew ire from a number of outspoken Chinese fans of American television.
The first three seasons of the fantasy programme are airing in a Putonghua dub on CCTV’s Premium Channel. The fourth season will air in English with subtitles, presumably because a dub has not yet been completed.
The show’s re-airing attracted an estimated 6.9 million viewers in only the second occasion that Game of Thrones has been broadcast on Chinese television.
The ease of downloading these pirated and unedited versions has left a number of Chinese viewers aware that much of the series’ blend of nudity, bloodshed and foul language is absent from CCTV’s official broadcasts.
“I estimate that they cut about twenty minutes,” one disgruntled Weibo commentator wrote after the first episode re-aired on Sunday. “The story feels discontinuous… [When they began re-airing it], my first reaction was ‘This can’t be!’ Then my second reaction was, ‘My God, what a mess.’”
“So they’ve cut about a quarter of all the fight scenes, then a quarter of the nude scenes,” another netizen quipped. “I guess that’s okay if all you want to watch is a medieval European castle documentary.”