The golden age of TV is also the golden age of the wig. But why are so many of them so distractingly terrible? Sam Brooks has a theory.

House of the Dragon, the prequel to Game of Thrones, is an intense show that requires multiple trigger warnings. It’s got dragons, dismemberings, gratuitous sex scenes. But maybe the most horrifying thing about it is the wigs.

Because House of the Dragon focuses on the Targaryen family, the royal dynasty predisposed to incest, it requires the actors in that family to don the trademark platinum blonde tresses. This means that a lot of those actors are wearing wigs. And those wigs… aren’t very good.

Wigs are commonplace in the screen industry. Sometimes an actor has to play a character who, shockingly enough, has different hair than their own, and it’s easier to achieve the desired hairstyle with a wig than by dyeing an actor’s hair, shaving it off, or spending hours styling it every day of the shoot. See: Every Nicole Kidman film ever. Yes, those are wigs.

I feel like I shouldn’t need to say this, but a good wig shouldn’t be obvious. The classic example of a good wig is Julianna Margulies’ in The Good Wife. It looks like it could feasibly grow out of her own head, because it’s a straight brown wig. A more current example would be Morfydd Clark, who plays Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Even though it’s deeply unlikely that anybody would have Galadriel’s waist-length blonde tresses, Clark at least looks like she could have hair like that. We buy it, even though her hair is about as realistic as… well, anything in Middle-earth.

Which brings us back to Game of Thrones. The problem with a bad wig is that it takes the viewer out of the scene. Even in a show where the dragons are obviously not real (sorry), a wig that doesn’t look like the actor’s hair is as distracting as a terrible accent. We’re not thinking about how fearsome Daemon Targaryen is, we’re thinking about the fact that Matt Smith looks like he is a cast member of TVNZ’s House of Drag, not HBO’s House of the Dragon.

This Vox explainer is a great insight into the production issues that might play into wigs being bad, including a lack of budget, a lack of time, or simply a lack of care taken when applying the wigs. However, I propose another theory: the problem isn’t just the wigs or how they’re laid atop the head. The problem is us.

A wig could be the best wig ever made, laid by literal angels, and it’d still register as a bad wig because… we know that’s not what Matt Smith’s hair looks like. Matt Smith has been around in the public eye for a couple of largely wigless decades. We know his hair definitely isn’t platinum blond, and even if it was, it definitely wouldn’t start at that hairline.

Way back when Game of Thrones started, Emilia Clarke could get away with the Targaryen tresses because we didn’t know who Emilia Clarke was. That allowed for just enough suspension of disbelief for us to accept that it was her actual hair, and then Daenerys was all good to go. The actual quality of the wig doesn’t matter so much – it just has to look plausible.

If we expect to see fake hair, we’re much more lenient. Take early-00s spy show Alias. It requires Jennifer Garner, as Sydney Bristow, to don many wigs and take on various disguises. We, the audience, know this is not Jennifer Garner’s real hair, so we’re a lot more forgiving. It also helps that these wigs are generally good, and tend to be part of a disguise intended to make Sydney Bristow not look like Jennifer Garner, to which I say: mission accomplished.

A more extreme example is RuPaul’s Drag Race. We know there are going to be wigs. We know we’re not seeing a contestant’s real hair, ever. The wig doesn’t have to do the heavy-lifting of keeping up an illusion, it just needs to match whatever the queen is trying to sell us.

Thus the problem, I believe, is not the actual wigs but how much is being asked of them. A wig is a beautiful piece of hair artistry that can transform a person’s entire look. It is not, however, a memory-erasing, reality-bending tool. No wig is good enough to make us forget that pretty much nobody has hair like a Targaryen, and especially not Paddy Considine. 

Wigs are meant to be laid, not to bear a heavy load. The right wig on the right head? Perfect, we don’t even notice. Wrong wig on the wrong head? It’s all we’re talking about.