Kneel Before the Throne

The show’s hero is led out, wrists bound, before a bloodthirsty crowd, accused of high treason against the king. He has made many foolish decisions, but he’s still the hero, played by the series’ most famous actor, and the story has given him an out: exile over execution. Surely, he’ll be banished for a season or two, then slowly work his way back to prominence until he’s once again doing good for goodness’ sake. That’s how this works, right? Well, that’s how it worked until Ned Stark’s head got chopped off near the end of Game of Thrones Season One, kicking off perhaps television’s last great watercooler phenomenon. A dozen years earlier, The Sopranos had tossed out many of TV’s unwritten rules with the episode where Tony strangled an informant with his bare hands, the sort of thing that just wasn’t done in the decades prior. But in the small-screen renaissance that followed, some notions still seemed sacrosanct, particularly: Don’t kill off your main character, especially before you’ve even finished your first season. Not only did Game of Thrones do that with Ned, but two seasons later, it bumped off his wife, Catelyn, son Robb and Robb’s pregnant wife, Talisa, after Robb had been plausibly established as Ned’s narrative successor. On this show, the heroes often died in brutal fashion — and with them, it seemed, all hope of a good ending to the series as a whole. And we ate it all up. For many reasons, Thrones has become a global phenomenon going into its eighth and final season on April 14th. It operates on a mammoth scale, filmed across multiple continents, delivering visual spectacle the likes of which we never expected from television. It has a wealth of memorable characters, all impeccably cast. But Ned’s execution — and the infamous Red Wedding, where Robb and company got stabbed in the back (and front and side) by supposed allies — looms large in the HBO drama’s legend. First, there is the fundamental surprise of it: The idea that, even post- Sopranos, there were places a scripted drama could go that had once seemed impossible. But Thrones was also the right show for a very wrong decade. As our own world seemed to make less sense with each passing year, there was something cathartic about journeying to the fantasy realm created by author George R.R. Martin, and adapted for television by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Westeros seemed just as rageinducingly capricious as our reality, but with dragons and giants and magical ice demons.

Thrones has straddled two eras: the revolutionary period of Tony Soprano’s peers and the overwhelming flood of scripted content that’s come to be known as Peak TV. Arriving a few years before Netflix got into the original-series business, it became a weekly communal experience. We breathlessly dissected each episode, even though the first five seasons largely adhered to the events of Martin’s books — which meant any fan could have spoiled themselves on the Red Wedding just by going to Wikipedia.

Yet the series was structured in a manner now familiar from the streaming world, where forward momentum matters above all else as you binge. There are a handful of GoT episodes that stand out by focusing on one location and subset of characters. Mostly, though, each installment is content to bounce from one city and group to the next, emphasizing individual moments over tradition

al episodic storytelling. But what moments! Where most streaming seasons get sluggish in the middle, Thrones presents enough standout scenes each week — sometimes action set pieces where dragons light armies on fire, often just conversations between two characters who share a complicated history — to make the approach work.

Credit the quality control of HBO (which threw out almost all of the series’ original pilot, directed by Spotlight’s Tom McCarthy, when it clearly wasn’t working) and the rich source material of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, which functioned like the Hydra of myth: Cut off one Stark’s head, and five compelling new figures would take his place. And, thanks to the superb ensemble, even potentially two-dimensional villains — Lena Headey’s Cersei, Jack Gleeson’s Joffrey — reached unexpected depth.

The series passed the events of the published books two seasons ago. This was perhaps for the best, as Martin’s texts could be both blessing and curse. (Some characters wandered for years until the plot was ready for them to return, and the show had a weakness for using sexual violence for shock value.) No major player has died since, which feels like a wise course correction. Too many showrunners have aped Thrones’ most superficial qualities, especially the shocking deaths of prominent characters.

That imitation will only increase after Thrones is gone, as others look to take its place. Amazon spent an absurd $250 million just for the rights to adapt the Lord of the Rings books, an exorbitant amount even compared with the reported $15 million that each of Thrones’ final six episodes cost to make. But that’s much too literal an approach to filling the enormous void that will be left in the TV landscape when Daenerys, Tyrion and the rest either die or fly off into the sunset on the backs of dragons. It’s not just that future fantasy epics will be unflatteringly compared with this one. It’s that the show was grandfathered in from another era when we still mostly watched TV on the same schedule, one week at a time. Game of Thrones was a great show, but it also came along at a perfectly imperfect time to become a phenomenon. We may never see its like again.