Launching a megabudget, high-profile show based on a series of books that hadn't even concluded yet? Why did anyone assume that would even work?
D&D were never more than reasonably competent TV hacks. They never showed signs of being any sort of creative geniuses. Why did anyone think they could produce material on a par with a brilliant novelist who's been working for decades?
In retrospect it kind of seems it was always doomed to fail.
Most people who started watching GoT have never even heard of them. The only reason GoT gained any traction was because of how phenomenal the first season was. Hell, that's how I stumbled onto it. When season two came rolling around and we saw that the quality of the show was still there from season one, I think a lot of people thought that either Martin was behind the helm or that he was at least involved in a such way that would lead the show to a complete resolution.
It wasn't until after season four that people started to worry a little bit. Seasons 4-6 were, on aggregate, still good enough to warrant a high rating, but most of it was from the previous seasons. Then season 7 came and pretty signaled the end of the GoT we knew.
I don't want to say it was doomed to fail. I think that there were a lot of variables at work here. There was potential for every season to be phenomenal, but it's hard to make a good show, especially without any source material.
Of course it was a gamble, because they were buying a series of books that not only weren't finished, but which had seriously declined in quality as they went along. HBO bet a shit-ton of money that their people could give the books the ruthless editing they'd needed all along and make them into a long, complex, but coherent story. They ALMOST succeeded, and maybe someday I'll stop fuming about season 8 and appreciate what they accomplished in seasons 1-7.
But they really did fuck up the last season, and I still don't know exactly what went wrong. Did they change GRRM's ending, as I have heard? Did they just fail to flesh out the ideas in GRRM's outline? Did they fail to realize that the reason GRRM couldn't finish the thing was that his ideas for the finale sucked?
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His last brilliant novel was written two decades ago.
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