Game of Thrones
The show of a generation, and a generation’s show.
Movies create fans, but television creates relationships. As the 2010s began, the relationships between viewers and their favorite shows were more harmonious and symbiotic than ever, because at the end of the Prestige TV era, TV was better than ever.
The late 90s/early 00s rise of The Sopranos and The Wire birthed the greatest decade of television in American history. Mad Men appeared on AMC in 2007 before Breaking Bad followed in 2008. NBC found sitcom gold (again[1]) with The Office in 2005, 30 Rock in 2006, and Parks and Recreation in 2009. Deadwood hit HBO like a stick of dynamite in 2004, and Lost was ABC’s smoke grenade that same year. The 2000s also gave us Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 24 and The West Wing, plus a whole slate of B- and C-tier shows that in any other era might have been national sensations, like The Shield, Justified, Downton Abbey or Nurse Jackie[2].
The uptick in quality took television from a gathering place in your home to a focal point of highbrow (and lowbrow![3]) American culture. Ratings weren’t hitting M*A*S*H* or Cheers numbers, even for the most popular network shows, but thanks to internet journalism, a still somewhat-limited number of options, and the uptick in quality, viewers could go deeper with a show than ever before. Lost message boards infected the internet. Sitcom quotes penetrated the lexicon (“That’s what she said!”). Recap-style reviews dissected Mad Men and Breaking Bad as much for their stylistic flourishes and dense themes as their rich plots. You didn’t turn on the TV while you ate dinner anymore. You turned on the TV, shut the hell up, and focused. This was serious business[4].
TV’s new respectability meant more possibilities for the people who made it. Writers’ room veterans and producers began spinning off from their Prestige-era projects to take more Peak-TV pie, and by the end of the 2000s, executives were throwing development deals at anyone who walked in the room. TV was where the money was, and where the acclaim was, and where the audience was. The most profitable way for studios to approach the change: Give the people more.
That’s how the Prestige TV era became the Peak TV era, an age defined by unprecedented choice more than unprecedented quality (though the quality is, by and large, still there). Viewers have so many TV options in 2019 and 2020—across network, cable, premium cable, and streaming platforms—that while it’s impossible to watch everything people say is great, anyone can find a show they like.
There isn’t such thing as a dissatisfied TV consumer anymore, but there is a lack of cultural consensus. When Walter White and Don Draper were looming large on AMC, it wasn’t hard to say what the best two or three shows on TV were. Now, it’s impossible. Maybe something’s really good on Crackle? Who knows[5]?
The immense array of options means watching TV now has a sacrificial quality to it, in which audiences are constantly weighing the opportunity costs of choosing one show over another. That’s made TV time feel a lot more valuable, and that’s made viewers more demanding of the shows they pick: If I’m choosing you among all these options, you better be worth it, because dammit, Mike won’t stop talking about Yellowstone on the GD Paramount Network, and if I’m missing that for some more bullshit about how the real monsters on The Walking Dead are the humans instead of the zombies, I’m going to lose my mind[6].
Peak TV has instilled a sense of entitlement in viewers. They expect loyalty to be rewarded with something great, and after Prestige TV, it feels fair to expect something great. The Sopranos is 20 years old now, after all.
From the creative side, increased demand from consumers (in both senses of the word) has led to many different strategies for trying to lure those viewers in, the most significant of which has been the appeal to genre fans. Of course, TV had explored genre before Peak TV—The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood—but such shows had to be trojan-horsed onto a primetime lineup inside a grabbier mode of appeal, like a pair of romantic leads or an auteur creator. Before Peak TV, genre was a way to put your show in a box. It narrowed the way in and lowered the ceiling of your audience.
But since Peak TV lowered the ceiling of everyone’s audience, genre’s niche appeal became a feature rather than a bug. That’s how it became possible for two men named David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to pitch Game of Thrones to HBO.
Benioff and Weiss were struggling when they latched themselves onto George R. R. Martin’s popular adult fantasy series. Benioff was best known (and only known) for writing the screenplay to Spike Lee’s 25th Hour[7], and Weiss had written a novel called Lucky Wander Boy. Other than that, they were no-names, but they were no-names with a great idea for a show and enough industry connections to take a meeting with, then win the approval of, Martin himself. HBO agreed to develop Game of Thrones beginning January 2007, snatching up the rights to Martin’s books and bringing the author along as executive producer beside Benioff and Weiss, who as showrunners would turn each book in the series into one season of television[8].
Game of Thrones is about as high fantasy as the genre can be. It’s full of magic and dragons and bloodlines and made-up languages and its whole plot is people arguing over who’s the rightful leader of “the Seven Kingdoms.” When it premiered in April 2011, a lot of people took these elements at face value and dismissed it as a lame swords-and-sorcerers show. What they would’ve seen if they had tuned in to the pilot was a closing scene of graphic incest before a boy is pushed out of a window. This was far from Lord of the Rings.
When the fantasy genre is labeled escapist, it sometimes come with the criticism that its detachment from the real world leads to immature or shallow storytelling (if your reason for existing is to give nerds a superiority complex, you’re not very interesting). Some critics thought Thrones was cut from this cloth—Ginia Bellafonte of the New York Times infamously called the show “boy fiction”—but those misconceptions are a good measuring stick of the incredible subversion Game of Thrones would execute. What looked like geekery was actually a political drama, and several episodes in, Thrones announced its true identity in an unforgettable way.
At the center of Thrones’ first season was a typical fantasy hero in Ned Stark, the supposed stand-in for all the losers who watched the show. Ned was noble, just, handsome, strong, and merciful without being soft. He was aspirational. He also had his head cut off in the show’s ninth episode.
It was the first of Thrones’ now infamous “holy shit” moments, the moment it set itself apart from other fantasy stories and turned audience expectations—if you’ll excuse the expression—on their heads. On this show, good people were punished, bad people won, and your definition of who was good or bad in the first place would change over time. In its early years, Game of Thrones cared more about the ideologies of its characters than about pleasing the fantasy fans who were drawn to it. That meant it was expressing an artistic vision. That meant everyone had to respect it.
As the show continued, its reputation for shocking twists, cruel deaths, and complex world-building drew more and more people to their TVs on Sunday nights. Early detractors—Bellafonte included—were eating their words and even the most fantasy-averse viewers were lapping at the show’s intrigue like dogs to peanut butter. Book readers who knew the show’s twists ahead of time were satisfied at every turn, and series newcomers were having their brains put in a blender. For the first time, a Peak TV show felt like a Prestige TV show. Everyone was talking about Thrones.
The show hit its creative pick during seasons three through six, when Benioff and Weiss mastered not just their role as executive producers over what became the largest-scale production in TV history[9], but their role as adaptors, too. The duo proved some of TV’s best dialogue writers in particular, a talent that saved Thrones from sinking in Martin’s cloying Westeros jargon and lent it a note of thematic excellence. Perhaps the most surprising thing you can say about Thrones is how, despite its impressive visual effects and lavish production design, its best scenes always involved two people in a room, talking.
And as showrunners, Benioff and Weiss wove the novels’ sticky web of narratives into something cohesive and accessible to casual viewers, distilling Thrones’ complicated mythology (and weird nomenclature) into something like a soap opera—secret pregnancies and vicious betrayals and forbidden love included[10]. That being said, Thrones elevated its plot’s soapier elements with terrific complexity. The guy who pushed the boy out of the window in the first episode? He was a fan favorite by the end of the show. The woman he was having incest with? She became the focal point of one of the series’ most emotional, sympathetic moments. It’s a testament to not just Martin’s vision in the original novels, but Benioff and Weiss’ deft hand in translating the books into something impactful beyond nerd culture.
However, as Game of Thrones hit its dramatic peak, the moments that sensationalized it began to overshadow its true successes and confuse audiences about what made the show great. While Benioff and Weiss spun conversational gold into every script and their excellent cast delivered that gold with aplomb, general audiences paid more attention to the shock-and-awe moments that dotted each season. “The Rains of Castamere,” season three’s penultimate episode better known as “The Red Wedding,” delivered such a brutal final twist—killing off so many characters presumed untouchable—that it probably persists as the most well-known TV moment of the past 10 years. It was a viral event in a way that makes the phrase actually mean something. It was recapped and blogged about and memed and WTF-ed within an inch of its life, raising Thrones’ Q rating overnight and changing the way other TV shows plotted themselves, too[11]. The Red Wedding reset the chessboard not just in the matches among the show’s many characters, but the match between the show’s creators and its audience.
More deaths followed “Rains”—there was a Purple Wedding and a head-squashing duel and a bathroom ambush with a crossbow—but even if these moments were only punctuation marks for seasons’ worth of more rewarding set-up, they became the whole sentence. Benioff and Weiss made Thrones an exercise in political intrigue, but fans saw it as the show that killed people.
The ideal version of Game of Thrones found overlap between those identities, where the political intrigue felt like blockbuster entertainment and the massive set pieces felt like intimate character moments, and no episode embodied this better than the season six finale “The Winds of Winter.” By this point in the series, the show had caught up to Martin’s unfinished books, and it looked like season seven would premiere before another book released. Benioff and Weiss had to extend, then end, Thrones in original fashion[12].
The duo set the stage for their personal ending with “Winds of Winter,” a sweeping, ambitious, jaw-dropping set of plot moves that didn’t so much turn over the Thrones chessboard as it did punt the chessboard over the fence and replace it with a different game. The episode seemed to promise that game would be as rich, if not richer, than anything audiences had seen before. Trust, acclaim, and anticipation for the series was at an all-time high[13].
But turns out, the game Benioff and Weiss wanted to play instead of prime Thrones chess was something more like checkers—same board, but simpler, less interesting, and less tactical. Seasons seven and eight of Game of Thrones are by far the show’s worst, and there are few to blame besides the two men who made the show such a success in the first place.
Though “Winds of Winter” found a balance between Benioff and Weiss’ strengths as adaptors and the fans’ favorite moments as viewers, as the show continued into seasons seven and eight, it veered hard from the former and went all-in on the latter. The result was a shocking 180 toward Thrones’ worst-case scenario: an indulgent, dumb fantasy show. The final episodes of the series are packed with nonsensical dragon fights, contrived romances, silly action scenes, zombie side quests (!), lots of hand-wavey plot developments, and clunky exposition dumps. All the throne-room drama and backroom conspiring of before was gone. Benioff and Weiss adapted the hell out of the Thrones books; they sure couldn’t write one themselves.
Perhaps the failure to shepherd Thrones to a solid conclusion came from a burden of expectation. Game of Thrones was the most talked-about show on the internet. It was no secret people wanted huge battles and epic showdowns between long-opposed characters, so it’s understandable why Benioff and Weiss would opt to just service the fans instead of play to their personal strengths. The problem was as much as fans wanted particular “holy shit” moments, they still wanted to feel the surprise of a “holy shit” moment. There’s always a way to deliver expected things in an unexpected way in storytelling (Thrones had been doing this for years!), but Benioff and Weiss couldn’t find it.
As Thrones continued toward the endgame, it seemed to become painfully aware of its own predictability. It began taking huge homerun swings in a desperate attempt to deliver: Minor deaths were treated like major goodbyes, enormous battles swapped tactical coherence for meme-manicured style, long-awaited reveals were relegated to fleeting moments that seemed more designed to trend on Twitter or generate GIFs than actually make for good TV.
Worst of all, people saw through Thrones’ sudden pandering. Wasn’t the show smarter than this? Wasn’t it more patient? Wasn’t it more focused on using its visual effects to enhance the performance of its cast[14], and not the other way around? The final episodes were disappointing, but beyond that, they felt like a betrayal. Thrones demonstrated a different set of values in its closing run, and part of that, ironically, was the viewers’ fault.
Some defenders of the Thrones ending will argue there’s no way a series finale can please anyone within the modern cultural discourse, since the way we evaluate things online kills nuance and elevates negativity. That can be true about internet conversations, but that doesn’t doom TV shows. Breaking Bad’s ending is well-regarded, as is Mad Men’s. Moreover, The Office, Parks and Rec, Broad City, The Americans, The Leftovers, Veep and Justified all have well-received endings. Even The Sopranos’ finale, appalling in its day, has been somewhat reclaimed as a masterstroke by TV fans online. The internet does not doom endings to suck; it just gives the endings that do suck a lot more attention than they would have otherwise[15].
What’s most interesting about the way Game of Thrones’ ending was received, however, was the way the internet wrestled ownership of the story away from Benioff and Weiss. Huge swaths of season seven, and almost all of season eight, seemed to be written in response to what fans would want to see, not what Benioff and Weiss envisioned and not what George R. R. Martin had created. The problem with reactionary storytelling, as you can probably intuit, is that it can’t react fast enough to the internet, which changes its consensus opinion on a dime. Thrones lost its identity, or perhaps it had its identity stolen.
TV shows usually end by falling back onto the identity assigned to them by their creators. Lost began as a character drama, morphed into a puzzle show, then fell back into a character drama right as people were preparing for a puzzle-show ending. Breaking Bad, meanwhile, was a character drama from start to finish, so even if that finale was a little narratively loose, it didn’t matter because it was true to what Breaking Bad had always been. Lost’s finale in a vacuum might have been a great episode of TV, too, but in light of what the show had told us to expect, it failed. Game of Thrones carries an adjacent truth.
Instead of falling back into its identity as a two-people-talking show down the stretch, Game of Thrones tried to morph into a shock-and-awe show. That meant a lot of battles and a lot of dying, and while these things do a lot to advance plot, they do little to advance story. That’s the final note on Thrones’ ending: It was a lot of “and then this happened,” and almost no “and this is how we felt about it.”
And yet, Game of Thrones shouldn’t be considered a disappointment. It’s without question one of the best shows of its generation and the most popular show of the 2010s, and that can be true even if it didn’t end well. The internet hasn’t been fair to the show’s legacy: This was a consistently strong, occasionally transcendent TV drama, one not without its problems[16], but one that captured the collective imagination in a way many thought wouldn’t and couldn’t happen in the era of Peak TV.
Now, a battle rages for the show’s ultimate place in the cultural memory. Benioff and Weiss have already lost. Their crimes against the show have been written in ink, but it remains to be seen if the fans who wrestled control away from them retain their grip on Thrones’ legacy or hand it back to the one other person with a right to wield it: Martin.
Yes, though he’s been on the sidelines of Thrones for years, George R. R. Martin still insists he’ll finish the books. It’s an unprecedented opportunity for an original artist to take back and redefine their work after it’s been interpreted by somebody else. Though Martin said he advised Benioff and Weiss on the show’s ending, that doesn’t bind him to replicate that ending in the books. He could tweak it, revitalize it, or even just leave it be. That final scenario is perhaps the saddest; from here, it would almost feel like a surrender for Martin to create something so beloved, hand it over, watch it morph into something worse, then shrug.
But even if Martin does want his story back, the internet has to hand it over. The 2010s saw fans empowered like never before in shaping how stories are made and received. As we’ll see in other chapters, that power has been wielded for evil more than good, but Thrones is unique. Fantasy fans act from the heart. They’ll sacrifice for things they care about. Maybe they’ll sacrifice control of Thrones for the sake of seeing it end in a way it deserves.
In the interim, the show’s shadow still looms large. Thrones set a new standard for television in the Peak TV era and caused every major production company to chase their own version of a genre-centered, money-fed juggernaut. From here, that pursuit seems a useless exercise. If Game of Thrones taught us anything, it’s that creating popular culture isn’t as simple as ticking boxes of what’s trending. The internet isn’t a tame group of consumers; it’s volatile and vicious. This beast will bite you even if you’re feeding it.
[1] NBC had Cheers throughout the 80s and Friends and Seinfeld in the 90s. Friends’ series finale aired May 6, 2004, and The Office premiered on March 24, 2005.
[2] This chapter will keep its focus on American television, though the BBC was doing great work in the 2010s, too. Sherlock had a moment between 2010 and 2012, the revival of Doctor Who has been inventive and electric, Black Mirror became the best anthology series on TV before jumping to Netflix, and the BBC crafted its own crime-show aesthetic with things like Luther, Peaky Blinders, and Poldark. They also gave us Planet Earth and The Great British Baking Show, the two most feel-good shows of the past 10 years.
[3] See the chapter on The Voice for an examination of the past decade in unscripted television.
[4] Again, this was the case in unscripted TV, too. How many times did a family member shush you for talking during a performance on American Idol?
[5] Actually, nothing’s good on Crackle. Their best thing for a while was Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, but then Seinfeld took it to Netflix. Nowadays, Crackle has something called The Oath, which is about a gang of crooked cops and is executive produced by 50 Cent, as well as Rob Riggle’s Ski Master Academy, which stars Rob Riggle as “washed-up action star Rob Riggle, who is looking to change the world through ‘personal watercraft education.’”…Wait, why am I not watching that?
[6] The Walking Dead was one of the few Touchstones considered that fell out of contention solely because of how sharply it declined in the latter half of the decade. Talk about a show that microwaves the same ideas over and over. Really, the best two things The Walking Dead gave us were its pilot—one of the best of the 2010s—and Steven Yeun. God bless Steven Yeun.
[7] Other credits: Troy (a three-hour excuse to show Brad Pitt’s ass), The Kite Runner (fine), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (puke), and—wow, for his first post-Thrones credit—Gemini Man, a 2019 movie in which an almost-washed Will Smith plays dual roles.
[8] Martin’s executive producer role on Thrones was more than lip service in the early going. He wrote an episode himself for each of the first four seasons (he had past experience in TV, having written eight episodes of The Twilight Zone in the 80s), including season four’s “The Lion and the Rose,” also known as “The Purple Wedding.”
[9] By its final seasons, the average Game of Thones episode cost an eye-popping $10 million. Martin’s world was so geographically sprawling, too, that the show had to deploy as many as four separate production units to shoot simultaneously around the world, in places like Croatia, Spain, Iceland, Morocco, Northern Ireland, and Malta. On top of all this, Thrones deployed some of the best visual effects ever seen on TV. Really, the show’s movie-quality production values should be one of the first things mentioned when discussing its legacy (so yes, it’s ironic it appears here as a footnote).
[10] Some more diehard Game of Thrones fans might deride that description, but look, this is a show about a bunch of people fighting for power, motivated by perceived privileges and inheritances. This isn’t a character drama like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and we’re not on a Sopranos or The Wire-like journey of watching institutions shape and be shaped by the people within them. Game of Thrones is a power struggle—a great, entertaining one!—but that means it’s more about plot than ideas. We’re here to find out who wins. That’s it.
[11] The most polarizing TV trope of the 2010s is the now-ubiquitous “shocking death,” Thrones’ biggest influence on TV storytelling. When the ruthlessness of Thrones proved essential to the way it pervaded the cultural landscape, other shows looking to become conversation pieces implemented unexpected deaths into their storylines, too (including House of Cards, The Walking Dead, and Grey’s Anatomy). By and large, these knock-off twists felt short-sighted and unearned, leaving the show in a corner it could only escape through cheap resurrections. The Walking Dead went from sensation to dumpster fire for this exact reason, and later seasons of Thrones lost their potency, too, for contriving fake half-deaths that felt more like glancing blows than gut punches. You just knew these people were coming back later.
[12] It’s said Martin consulted on the show’s ending, even giving Benioff and Weiss an outline of how he planned to end his books, but it’s still unclear exactly how much detail he gave them and how much they followed his plan.
[13] It’s worth expanding on this just a bit more: “The Winds of Winter” is one of the best TV episodes of the decade. Its plot mechanizations are fueled by emotion, its set pieces pay off seasons’ worth of simmering storylines, and it balances the show’s criss-crossing narratives so well that everyone feels like the center of the episode. It’s awesome.
[14] Another Thrones sub-point that could be written about in much more detail but will again be left for the footnotes: This show truly brought together one of the best ensemble casts of its era. Peter Dinklage was a revelation as Tyrion Lannister, as was Lena Headey as Cersei Lannister and Nikolaj Coster-Waldeau as Jaime. Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke were less good as Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen (they were most exposed when they became a couple at the end of the series), but their storylines were propped up by great turns from Maisie Williams (Arya), Sophie Turner (Sansa), and Iain Glen (Jorah Mormont). Gwendoline Christie owned as Brienne of Tarth, and who could forget Jason Momoa—the future Aquaman himself—as Khal Drogo?
[15]It’s 100 percent true, in fairness to this counterpoint, that the internet has overall doled out more punishment for bad TV than it has praise for good TV. Shows like Dexter and How I Met Your Mother were raked online for their terrible finales, and it’s affected their legacies forever. These days, those shows are more known for being ultimately dissatisfying than for the years of quality they did string together. The biggest victim of this dynamic, without question, is Lost. The sci-fi show is still known among culture critics and TV writers as one of the greatest and most influential shows of all time, but in the general consciousness, the polarizing ending is the first thing anyone mentions about it, and because of the way we talk about TV now, that polarization is the end-all, be-all for people looking for a new show to watch. It doesn’t matter that Lost was pound-for-pound one of the most exciting shows of its era; it had an ending most people didn’t like, and that means it’s been deemed a waste of time. Frustrating.
[16] To put in a few sentences what others have and will put upon pages and pages, Game of Thrones always struggled with sexual politics, and failed its female characters pretty spectacularly in the end. There are tons of reasons for this—a lack of representation in the writers’ room, Martin’s admittedly iffy treatment of sex in the original series, Benioff and Weiss’ personal blindspots—and the manifestations were nasty. Thrones had some truly despicable rape scenes in it, and it used rape often as a motivator for the victims and the witnesses. Most complaints about Thrones are over harmless plot points, but this particular note of criticism is significant; this type of storytelling does damage.