10 Things We Learnt About Game Of Thrones Past And Present

Sitting On The Throne

Game Of Thrones Season Eight episode three is on HBO tonight in the US and here’s 10 things we learnt from an interview that Sunday Times The Culture did with showrunners Benioff and Weiss last weekend. Warning: a few spoilers if people haven’t seen every episode of Game Of Thrones…

1. “Audience satisfaction implies that the audience is a singular entity with a shared response but the truth is that different people will have different responses. Some people thought the end of The Sopranos was frustrating. Some thought it was brilliant,” Benioff on audience satisfaction
2. Wrapping up the series isn’t about making people feel that it’s all resolved neatly, Benioff continued: “The point is that there will not be a uniform reaction to our finale, and it seems both impossible and undesirable to create an ending that scores 100% on the satisfaction meter. Besides, what’s so great about being satisfied? We’re after passion here, not contentment.”
3. The pair have thought about the end of HBO”s The Sopranos a great deal as Weiss revealed: “I remember being on a subway car in New York a few days after The Sopranos finale aired and there were four separate conversations going on about what really happened. It seemed like the whole city was discussing Tony Soprano and whether he died or not. That ending was brave and utterly original.”
4. The conclusion of Breaking Bad was also something the pair closely monitored as it happened while they were working on Game Of Thrones, Weiss said: “The final season of Breaking Bad was brilliant but every season of Breaking Bad was brilliant. We were shooting Thrones in Croatia when that came out, and I remember downloading it, locking the doors, closing all the windows, turning off the phones and being more focused on what was happening on a screen since, jeez, probably the end of Empire Strikes Back.”
5. When the pair were brought onboard, they made a pilot for the show but it wasn’t all plain sailing at the start:”We made the original pilot and showed it to some people, smart people, good friends of ours. In the scene where Bran catches Jaime and Cersei going at it in the old tower, no-one watching knew Jaime and Cersei were brother and sister. Which is arguably the entire point of the episode. It felt like a relatively profound writing and showrunning failure,” Weiss admits.
6. So they reshot the pilot but it was touch and go at the beginning: “That first year was probationary. It was, like, ‘All right, these guys are probably not very good at this. Let’s see what they can do. We’ve already sunk a lot of money into this pilot. Might as well get one season out of it,'”, Weiss revealed.
7. Fans do like to try and predict what is coming next on the show and this is something that the showrunners actually quite like, although they see them as a double edged sword: “Fan theorising is fun. We all do it with our favourite shows – not necessarily online, but in discussions with friends. But spoilers are frustrating. The urge to ruin someone else’s experience is juvenile and dickish,” Weiss feels.
8. The big events that have taken place during the show’s run have elicited responses from viewers and they are the first to admit that this is bound to happen: “On some level, yeah, we did realise that people are probably going to freak out when Sean Bean [Ned Stark] gets his head chopped off. I don’t know if we knew the level at which they would freak out, but we knew that if people cared about the show, then the fact that the guy who was on the poster got his head chopped off would probably shock them,” Benioff admits.
9. Death has played a major role in the show: “The worst kinds of death happen off screen. The best kind are memorable – Hodor, Oberyn, Joffery. If you watch the show, you remember how those dudes bought it,” Benioff says.
10. TV has changed inexorably since the show began and Benioff is aware of how different things could have been if it was a show on a streaming service where it could have been binged a whole season at a time: “We do love airing on Sunday nights [in the US] and having most of our audience watching at the same time. That sort of synchronised viewing is becoming increasingly anachronistic, but there’s real value to it. The Pickwick Papers became a phenomenon in part because Londoners were eagerly awaiting each new instalment. There is something nice about anticipating something in a communal way,” Benioff admits.

Game of Thrones is on HBO in the US every Sunday and on Sky Atlantic in the UK each Monday.