GAME OF THRONES, ENTOURAGE, and HBO's Broken Promise

For a while now, Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have said that the wildly successful HBO series will come to an end after seven seasons. That's been the plan for a long time, but in a new interview, programming president Michael Lombardo says that's not exactly a done deal just yet. He's still hoping to convince the showrunners to extend the series for at least another season, but he does admit he'll give in if Benioff and Weiss are adamant about their plan for the show's conclusion.

“This is the hard part of what we do. We started this journey with David and Dan. It’s their vision. Would I love the show to go 10 years as both a fan and a network executive? Absolutely.

“We’ll have an honest conversation that explores all possible avenues. If they weren’t comfortable going beyond seven seasons, I trust them implicitly and trust that’s the right decision—as horrifying as that is to me. What I’m not going to do is have a show continue past where the creators believe where they feel they’ve finished with the story.”

Seems like a pretty reasonable thing for a network executive to say, right? He obviously wants more episodes of the show because it's so popular, but at the same time, he's willing to trust the showrunners and stick with their vision. That's admirable.

One thing Lombardo isn't really excited about, though, is a Game of Thrones movie. The idea has been tossed around, and with the show already hitting theaters in a limited engagement earlier this year, it's not like it'd be the first time these characters appeared on the big screen. Lombardo continues,

“Certainly there have been conversations where it’s been said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to do that?’ But when you start a series with our subscribers, the promise is that for your HBO fee that we’re going to take you to the end of this. I feel that on some level [a movie would be] changing the rules: Now you have to pay $16 to see how your show ends.”

I almost can't believe Lombardo would say something like that. Oh, don't get me wrong - it makes perfect sense. And it'd be great if that notion held true with all HBO programs. But that "promise" is something the network broke in a major way with back in 2011. Lombardo has held his current position as president of programming at HBO since June 2007. He's overseen the ending of multiple TV shows during his tenure there, but none have been as embarrassingly transparent as the conclusion of Doug Ellin's Entourage.

(Spoilers for the end of Entourage ahead.)

The show's entire eighth season drove major characters apart and seemed to be building to some big changes for everyone involved, but audiences never got the payoff we expected. Instead, the show gave us a rushed ending that featured the main characters all gathered at an airport, flying away without really completing what little arcs remained by that point in the show. It was a rush job, plain and simple, and there was absolutely zero satisfaction when the final credits began to roll.

The worst part about it? The show ended in 2011, but Ellin and executive producer Mark Wahlberg had been talking about making an Entourage movie for a while before that, and from a couple of interviews they gave around that time, it seems like it was their plan all along to make a movie after the show was over.

You can crap on the quality of Entourage all you want - I'm fully aware that it wasn't a great show, but that's not the point here. The point is that fans paid for a subscription to HBO, invested their time to watch eight full seasons of the show, and then were rewarded for their loyalty with the characters basically flipping everyone off as they flew off into the sunset saying, "We know you're going to pay to come see our movie finish this story, so we'll see you there, suckers!" It couldn't be a more obvious break of Lombardo's promise he mentioned regarding Game of Thrones.

Yes, it's admittedly slightly ridiculous that I'm still bitter about the finale of a show that ended four years ago. But that's just it - while we saw the last episode, it wasn't actually the finale, since the creators planned on capping off the series with a movie, shafting the fans and forcing them to pay for a ticket to see how the story really ends. It's the kind of bullsh*t move I've come to expect in today's Hollywood landscape, but with Lombardo trying to take the high road with his recent comments about how the network wouldn't do such a thing to fans of Game of Thrones, I'm wondering if he's forgotten that he and HBO took the low road not too long ago with the ending of Entourage.