How GoT dominated the decade then lost its way

Endlessly dissected online and beloved by everyone from former president Barack Obama to Snoop Dogg, it became the subject of countless fan videos and closed out the decade as the most popular show onearth, averaging more than 25 million viewers per episode (an official figure that didn’t even take into account the illegal downloads, which also saw it win the dubious accolade oftheglobe’s most pirated TV show). Westeros DNA can be spied in everything from straightforward historical epics such as The Last Kingdom to the weird, wild world of Sky Atlantic’s Britannia. At the time of airing, the episode – in which Cersei Lannister wiped out Baelor’s Sept and with it much of the cast – was hailed as a triumph, a sure sign that Benioff and Weiss had a thrilling endgame in mind. In reality, it was the moment that fatally weakened the foundations onwhich the series was built – and provided proof that, when in doubt, the writers would always blow things up first and ask questions later. Having established Cersei as a master villain, Benioff and Weiss appeared to have no idea what to do with her, largely deserting the intrigue in King’s Landing to concentrate on the epic fights. That was understandable given the importance of a final showdown between the Night King’s undead army and the rest of humanity, but the gaping hole where politics used to be ensuredthat the last two seasons prized showy did-you-see-that? moments – the sudden death of Littlefinger, Daenerys’s fiery destruction of King’s Landing – over carefully nurtured plotsandcharacter development. Huge adaptations of Lord of the Rings, Robert Jordan’s classic fantasy The Wheel of Time and Patrick Rothfuss’s cult series The Kingkiller Chronicle are in the works. Some may prove to be worth the wait, although it’s hard not to wonder if TV will already have moved on by the time they arrive because perhaps the most interesting thing about Game of Thrones is the way that – despite all its noise and thunder – it faded so swiftly from the collective memory, slipping down the best-of-the-decade lists and increasingly attacked for beingnot so much the story of Shakespearian grandeur it promised to be but instead, in Macbeth’s words, a tale “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”. At its best, though, Game of Thrones was addictive and unmissable TV, filled with great lines and genuinely surprising and well-earned moments. Martin’s book, “Fire & Blood,” the story is set 300 years prior to the events of the original series, chronicling the rise and reign of House Targaryen.

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