Game of Thrones

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Game of Thrones premiered on HBO on the 17th of April 2011, and when it ended on the 19th of May 2019, it had run for 73 episodes across eight seasons. David Benioff and D. B. Weiss built it as the first adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels. The pilot was a disaster behind the scenes. After a private viewing, HBO demanded an extensive re-shoot, redoing about 90 percent of the episode with cast and directorial changes. Out of that near-collapse came a show that critics would name among the greatest television series of all time. It would also draw 59 Primetime Emmy Awards, more than any other drama series. So how did a project deemed unfilmable become a record-breaking phenomenon? What did its creators have to invent to put dragons and a continent on a television budget? And why did the same series end with fans signing a petition to have its final season remade?

• 2. The Unfilmable Pitch

  ›

  In January 2006, David Benioff had a telephone conversation with George R. R. Martin's literary agent about the books the agent represented. Benioff had loved fantasy as a younger man but had never read A Song of Ice and Fire. The agent sent him the first four books. Benioff read a few hundred pages of the first novel, A Game of Thrones, shared his enthusiasm with D. B. Weiss, and proposed they adapt it for television. Weiss finished the first novel in what he estimated as maybe 36 hours. The two pitched the series to Martin across a five-hour meeting in a restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard. According to Benioff, they won Martin over by knowing the answer to his question, "Who is Jon Snow's mother?". Before Benioff and Weiss arrived, Martin had already met other scriptwriters, most of whom wanted to adapt the series as a feature film. Martin deemed that approach impossible, calling the work "unfilmable". He noted that one of his novels runs as long as The Lord of the Rings, which had taken three feature films to adapt. Benioff agreed the scale was too big for a single film, and dozens of characters would have to be discarded. He argued that a studio-financed fantasy movie of this scope would almost certainly need a PG-13 rating, which would mean no sex, no blood, and no profanity. Martin was pleased by the suggestion of an HBO series, saying he "never imagined it anywhere else". The series began development in January 2007, with Martin signed on as a co-executive producer who would read the script outlines and offer comments.

• 3. Building Westeros On Camera

  ›

  The pilot reportedly cost HBO between $5 million and $10 million to produce, and the first season's budget was estimated at $50 million to $60 million. Costs only climbed from there. The sixth-season budget ran over $10 million per episode, a season total of over $100 million that set a record for a series's production cost. By the final season, the production budget per episode was estimated at $15 million. The show was shot across the United Kingdom, Canada, Croatia, Iceland, Malta, Morocco, and Spain. Belfast's Paint Hall Studios anchored the first season, while exterior scenes in Northern Ireland used locations like Castle Ward for Winterfell and the Magheramorne quarry for Castle Black. When production needed a walled coastal medieval city, it turned to Dubrovnik, where the Walls of Dubrovnik and Fort Lovrijenac stood in for King's Landing. Iceland's glaciers near Vik and Skaftafell became the frozen lands beyond the Wall. Visual effects supervisor Joe Bauer said the team worked on more than 10,000 shots of visual effects across all eight seasons. More than 300 artists worked on the show's visual effects team, and the series won eight Creative Arts Emmy Awards for visual effects. Pixomondo kept a team of 22 to 30 people focused solely on Daenerys Targaryen's dragons, taking 20 to 22 weeks per season. The muscle and wing movements of the adolescent dragons in seasons four and five were based largely on those of a chicken. The detail extended down to the wardrobe. Wigs made of human hair, up to two feet in length, cost as much as $7,000 each, and styling Emilia Clarke's platinum-blonde look took about two hours.

• 4. Running Out Of Book

  ›

  Game of Thrones used seven writers over its eight seasons, with Benioff and Weiss writing most of each season's episodes themselves. Martin wrote one episode in each of the first four seasons, then stopped so he could focus on completing the sixth novel, The Winds of Winter. The intention had been simple at the start, with each novel meant to yield a season's worth of episodes. The first two seasons followed that plan, adapting A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings in turn. By the fifth season, the writers drew on A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons, and original content at once. The series began outpacing the published novels in the sixth season. From that point, the show was based on a plot outline of the future books that Martin provided, plus original material the showrunners created. Before season four, Martin had already flagged the problem of the television series catching up to source material he had not yet written. According to Benioff, Martin gave the showrunners an outline covering the final two books. The shift changed the nature of the show. In early seasons, under the influence of the books, main characters were regularly killed off, which was credited with building tension among viewers. In later seasons, critics pointed out that certain characters had developed "plot armor" to survive unlikely situations, attributing this to the series becoming more of a traditional television show. In April 2016, the showrunners planned 13 more episodes after the sixth season, split as seven and six, and HBO announced in June 2016 that the eighth would be the final season.

• 5. Medieval Realism

  ›

  George R. R. Martin set out to make the story feel more like historical fiction than contemporary fantasy. He wanted less emphasis on magic and sorcery and more on battles, political intrigue, and the characters, believing magic should be used moderately in epic fantasy. "The true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves", Martin said. Academics have classified the series as neo-medieval, sitting where medieval history overlaps with popular fantasy. A principal inspiration for the novels is the English Wars of the Roses, fought between 1455 and 1485 between the houses of Lancaster and York, reflected in Martin's houses of Lannister and Stark. The scheming Cersei Lannister evokes Isabella, the "She-Wolf of France", who lived from 1295 to 1358. She and her family appear in Maurice Druon's historical novel series The Accursed Kings, a main inspiration for Martin. Real history seeds nearly every corner of the world. Hadrian's Wall becomes Martin's Wall, Damascus steel becomes Valyrian Steel, and Byzantine Greek fire becomes the "wildfire". The Colossus of Rhodes inspired the Titan of Braavos, and the Library of Alexandria the Hightower of Oldtown. Icelandic sagas of the Viking Age shaped the Ironborn, and the Mongol hordes the Dothraki. The political world Martin built rarely flatters its rulers. Leaders are mostly portrayed negatively, disregarding the common people and guided by selfish reasons. Possible exceptions include Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, and Tyrion Lannister, who show concern for the populace, though their methods have drawn criticism. A 2012 study of 40 recent television drama shows ranked Game of Thrones second in deaths per episode, averaging 14. A 2018 scientific study found that about 60 percent of the major characters died as a result of violence and war.

• 6. The Nudity And Violence Backlash

  ›

  Stephen Dillane, who played Stannis Baratheon, likened the series's frequent explicit scenes to "German porn from the 1970s". The amount of sex and nudity, especially in scenes incidental to the plot, drew much of the criticism aimed at the first two seasons. The show's habit of delivering exposition alongside sex or nudity earned a coined term, "sexposition", and was criticized as distracting. Saturday Night Live parodied it with a sketch casting a 13-year-old boy as a Game of Thrones consultant whose main concern was showing as many breasts as possible. The criticism sharpened around specific scenes. The third-season episode "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" featured the lengthy torture and eventual emasculation of Theon Greyjoy, which New York magazine called "torture porn". A scene in the fourth-season episode "Breaker of Chains", in which Jaime Lannister rapes his sister Cersei in the tomb of their dead son, triggered broad public discussion. Director Alex Graves added to the outrage by saying the scene became "consensual by the end". The fifth season pushed the response to a breaking point. In "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken", Sansa Stark is raped by Ramsay Bolton, and most reviewers found the scene gratuitous and unnecessary. The pop culture website The Mary Sue announced it would stop covering the series over the repeated use of rape as a plot device, and US Senator Claire McCaskill said she would no longer watch. George R. R. Martin defended the material, saying he felt obliged to be truthful about history and human nature, that rape and sexual violence are common in war, and that omitting them would have rung false. Sophie Turner, who played Sansa, later spoke about the long-term impact she believed the heavy scenes would have on her, and revealed she developed coping mechanisms to get through filming.

• 7. A Disappointing Conclusion

  ›

  Game of Thrones holds an overall rating of 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 86 on Metacritic, with the first six seasons earning the strongest acclaim. Reviewers praised the early seasons for high production values, a fully realized world, and compelling characters. According to Variety, there may be no show more profitable to its network, calling the fantasy series a gamble that paid off handsomely. The acclaim narrowed as the source novels ran out. Without new book material, the series became less character-driven and more reliant on big twists and spectacle, and the final two seasons drew more criticism. Season seven won praise for its action sequences but was faulted for pacing and plot developments said to have "defied logic". Critical reception for season eight was mixed. Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, Maureen Ryan condemned the season's reductive treatment of women and decisions "set up and executed with little or no foresight", declaring the penultimate episode "Game of Thrones at its worst". A petition on Change.org, started by some fans, requested that the final season be remade with different writers. Casey Bloys, HBO's president of programming, said the petition showed enthusiasm and passion but was not something the network seriously considered. In 2023, the series landed on The Guardian's list of worst TV endings of all time. The picture was not all dark. The lighting itself became a recurring complaint from season six onward, as viewers struggled to see what was happening, especially during the eighth-season battle episode "The Long Night". Cinematographer Robert McLachlan explained the darkness as an artistic choice, saying the team was "trying to be as naturalistic as possible". Even amid the backlash, the music and visual effects were praised, and the cast performances were admired across the entire run. Peter Dinklage's portrayal of Tyrion earned him Emmy and Golden Globe awards, with Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times writing that in many ways the show belonged to Dinklage.

• 8. The Cultural Footprint

  ›

  By 2019, 350,000 visitors, one sixth of all tourists, came to Northern Ireland annually because of Game of Thrones. According to First Minister Arlene Foster, the series gave Northern Ireland the most publicity in its history apart from The Troubles. The pull extended far beyond Belfast. Between 2014 and 2016, Hotels.com reported hotel bookings rose by 285 percent in Iceland and 120 percent in Dubrovnik, and in 2016 bookings doubled in Ouarzazate, Morocco. The flood of visitors to Dubrovnik grew heavy enough that its mayor imposed limits on tourist numbers over concerns about over-tourism. The show reshaped language and even baby names. "Khaleesi", a Dothraki title rather than a name in the story, became more popular as a name for baby girls in the United States, and "Arya" was the fastest-rising girl's name in the country in one year, jumping from 711th to 413th place. The producers had commissioned conlanger David J. Peterson to construct the Dothraki and Valyrian languages from the few words in the novels, and he wrote 300 pages of Dothraki material before production. Duolingo began offering High Valyrian courses in 2017, drawing 1.2 million sign-ups between 2017 and 2020. The fandom drew scientists as well as linguists. Australian scientists conducted a survival analysis of mortality among 330 important characters across the first seven seasons, and in 2019 the Australian Red Cross used international humanitarian law to determine which characters had committed the most war crimes. The show even left its mark on the animal kingdom, lending its names to three species of mud dragons and a bee fly called Paramonovius nightking. The latest chapter reaches into genetics. In 2025, Colossal Biosciences announced it was working to de-extinct the dire wolf, with Kit Harington, Sophie Turner, and George R. R. Martin among the investors, and the resulting wolves named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi.