GAME OF THRONES Creators Address Season Finale Backlash
Game of Thrones had a great run… until creators, writers, and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss ran out of book material to use and started to wing it. I was not a fan of the final two seasons of the show, but the final season is where it really went off the rails. They didn’t really know how to end it, and it left a lot of fans disappointed. It’s considered one of the worst TV finales ever.
Benioff and Weiss have now weighed in on the backlash the finale received and they also discuss walking away from the franchise. While talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Benioff said:
"You always hope everyone’s going to love anything you do and it would’ve been great if 100 percent of people loved it, but they didn’t. You can get so bogged down in public opinion that you spend your whole life googling things and trying to find people who felt one way or the other way."
Weiss added:
"Even super positive feedback makes you feel weird and teeth-grindy and on edge. There’s a drug quality to the feedback, and as soon as we went cold turkey - the last time I googled myself was in 2013 - the ambient stress level in our lives dropped by about 50 percent overnight."
The two previously admitted they didn’t know much about Game of Thrones, the world or the characters. They said that they didn’t know why George R.R. Martin trusted them with his life’s work.
They went on to admit they had no experience and no knowledge of what it took to make a TV show. They had no qualifications before they were hired and said the whole experience was an expensive film school for them and a learning experience. They found themselves way over their heads and the final couple of seasons proved that they had no idea what to do.
It was also revealed that plan was to downplay the fantasy elements to help expand the fanbase to include “mothers, NFL players.” They also never really tried to boil down all of the books’ essential elements, saying “No. We didn’t. The scope was too big. It was about the scenes we were trying to depict and the show was about power.”
As I said before, knowing this now, it’s insane that the show managed to survive as long as it did under the guidance of these guys. They faked it until they made it!