What Games of Thrones means to today’s television-makers, 5 years after the finale
Something that makes television amazing is how it can build stories across hours, months, and years, expand whole worlds into deep and intense narratives, and beam it right into our homes, our brains. Something else incredible about TV is how sometimes the only thing people remember is the ending.
The whiplash of possibilities has never been clearer than on Game of Thrones. For all the record-breaking ratings, awards, and dramatic highs, the HBO series is still the modern shorthand for “didn’t stick the landing.” After all those ambitious battles on horseback, five years after the finale, Game of Thrones’ lasting legacy can feel like that half-drawn horse — but viewers saddled up for a reason
In season 1, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ drew in fans of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series — and millions of newcomers — with meticulously sprawling political plots, complicated characters, and even a whodunnit. Abruptly axing Ned Stark in the penultimate episode made the game of Game of Thrones clearer than ever: You win. Or you die.
Into season 2, Benioff and Weiss wielded the bombastic stakes set down by the books. In Martin’s world, no fantasy trope was ever neat, and it was rarely simple. The beautiful girl noticed by the prince found herself in a horror story; the boy king was either malevolent or misguided, with no Merlin to bail him out. Game of Thrones’ inversions grew like vines, constantly spreading and weaving together to more and more complicated patterns. Success was debatable — even fans questioned the nuance of the Lannisters, or the fraught sexposition that the show often employed for exposition-heavy scenes — but the tendrils of the HBO show made it flush and sturdy, even if things in Meereen floundered a bit.
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Still, it’s no wonder that the second the roots of Game of Thrones felt too overgrown, people turned on it. Frustrated fans waited years (or decades, for book stans) for a fitting conclusion to what felt like t
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