7 / 10
Game of Thrones is the single best argument in the history of television for finishing your source material before you start the show.
David Benioff and D. B. Weiss developed the HBO series, adapted from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels. The first four seasons are some of the best television ever made. The fifth is good. The sixth is okay. The seventh is bad. The eighth ranks among the most spectacular creative collapses in the medium’s history.
The composite grade is a 7 because the highs are 10s and the lows are 2s and that averages out.
No show has thrilled me more and then let me down harder. I’d put the first four seasons against anything HBO ever aired, and the last two sting in the way only something I loved could.
The cast is enormous. Sean Bean as Ned Stark in the first season. Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister across all eight. Lena Headey as Cersei. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jaime. Emilia Clarke as Daenerys. Kit Harington as Jon Snow. Maisie Williams as Arya. Sophie Turner as Sansa. Iain Glen, Charles Dance, Diana Rigg, Aidan Gillen, Conleth Hill, Liam Cunningham, Stephen Dillane, Natalie Dormer. The supporting bench is one of the deepest in television history. The casting director, Nina Gold, deserves a chapter in any future history of the medium.
Seasons One Through Four
The first four seasons faithfully adapt the first three books, with the third book split across seasons three and four. This material is fully written. Martin had spent years working through the structure. The show benefits from a foundation it didn’t have to invent. Ned Stark’s execution at the end of season one is one of the great moments in television because the audience doesn’t believe the show will do it. The show does it. Every later twist hits harder because the audience knows the show has no rules.
The Red Wedding in season three is the high point. The Purple Wedding in season four pays off setup that took two and a half seasons. The Battle of the Blackwater and the Battle of Castle Black are two of the best single hours of action television ever produced. The show was firing at the top of its form because Martin had given them material to work with.
The Red Wedding is the hour I’d hand anyone who doubts what television can do. It’s cruel, it’s completely consistent with everything the show had set up, and it leaves the audience nowhere to hide.
For Writers
Adaptation is structurally different from original creation. The first four seasons of Game of Thrones were an HBO production team executing on Martin’s existing plot architecture. The plot decisions had been made and tested. Martin had built the character beats. The showrunners had to compress, cast, and direct. The lesson is that adaptation buys you a foundation but commits you to a structure you didn’t design. When the source ends, you have to design. The two skills aren’t the same and being good at one doesn’t make you good at the other.
The Collapse
By season five, the show had caught up to the published books. Martin hadn’t finished The Winds of Winter and has still not finished it. The showrunners were on their own. The fifth season is uneven but mostly works. The sixth is structurally panicked. The seventh accelerates the plot to a pace the established world can’t support. The eighth tries to land plot threads that needed twenty more hours of setup to land properly. By the final episode, the showrunners have resolved half the major arcs in ways the previous seasons didn’t justify.
The failures are well documented. Daenerys’s heel turn requires the audience to forget her established characterization. The Night King’s death after eight seasons of buildup happens in a single move from a character who hadn’t been positioned to do it. Cersei spends the final season standing on a balcony. Bran becomes king for reasons the show doesn’t adequately explain. The destruction of the show’s reputation across two seasons is among the most thorough creative collapses any major property has ever suffered.
Daenerys is the one that makes me angriest. Benioff and Weiss spent years building that character with real care, and then they flipped her because the ending they’d chosen needed a villain. I don’t buy a second of it.
For Writers
A story’s ending must honor the setup. Game of Thrones spent eight seasons building specific expectations about specific characters. The final season didn’t honor most of them. The audience felt betrayed because the show had implicitly promised the audience that it would respect what it had built. The lesson is that the ending is the entire purpose of the rest of the work. If you can’t get the ending right, you can’t write the rest. Plan the ending first or accept that the ending will determine how the audience remembers the rest.
The Cast Memory
The seven seasons of strong work are still good. The cast performances don’t go away because the writing collapsed. Peter Dinklage won three Emmys for Tyrion and deserved them. Lena Headey was robbed of any Emmy because the show was a victim of its own success and the supporting categories were overstuffed with worthy nominees. Diana Rigg as Olenna Tyrell is one of the great late-career performances in television. The casting bench was so deep that audiences still remember even one-season characters like Charles Dance’s Tywin Lannister fifteen years later.
Rigg’s Olenna is my favorite thing in the whole series. Every line she delivers sounds like it cost somebody their dignity, and she steals every scene she’s in. The achievement isn’t nothing. For five or six years, Game of Thrones was the most-watched, most-discussed, most-influential television series on the planet. It’s the reason every streaming service spent the next decade trying to produce its own fantasy epic. It also failed its ending. Both are true.
For Writers
A great middle without a great ending is still mostly worth doing, but the ending will be what gets remembered. Game of Thrones produced some of the best television hours ever broadcast and is now mostly remembered for its disastrous finale. The lesson is that audiences remember the last thing they saw more vividly than the best thing they saw. That’s how memory works. If you produce great material, finish strong. The strength of the middle won’t survive a weak ending.
Craft Note
David Benioff and D. B. Weiss developed for HBO. Based on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Eight seasons, seventy-three episodes, 2011 through 2019. Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, Maisie Williams, Sophie Turner, and a deep supporting cast. Approximately fifteen million dollars per episode by the final season. Ramin Djawadi scored. Multiple Emmy winner for Outstanding Drama Series. Spinoffs and prequels including House of the Dragon followed.
Is Game of Thrones (2011-2019) worth watching?
7/10 composite. 10/10 for seasons one through four. 6/10 for five and six. 3/10 for seven and eight.
The 7 is arithmetic, and it hides how I feel about the thing. The first four seasons are as good as television gets, and the last two squandered years of goodwill in a way I find infuriating. Watch the first four. Watch five and six knowing the quality is dropping. Skip seven and eight or accept that you won’t enjoy them.
