"Game of Thrones" Review: The Best Show That Fell Apart

Everyone already knows season 8 is bad. That is not a review; it is common knowledge at this point. The only question still worth asking is the one people actually have: if you have never watched it, is it still worth starting?

Yes and no, and which one you get depends entirely on what kind of viewer you are.

If you watch for the journey, you will get an enormous amount out of this. If you watch for the destination, if the ending is what validates everything that came before it, then think carefully. This show does not pay you off. It spends six years building something extraordinary and then knocks it over in the last two.

The Scorecard

That is not a gentle slope. It is a cliff, and it is worth understanding why the drop happens exactly where it does, because the reasons are structural rather than mysterious.

What It Does Better Than Almost Anything

Seasons 1 through 4 contain some of my favourite storytelling in any medium.

The appeal is that it takes its own world seriously. Actions have consequences that arrive three episodes or three seasons later. Characters are competent and still lose because someone else was more competent, luckier, or simply willing to do something worse. Nobody has plot armour. The show establishes that in the first season, in a way that rewrote what many viewers thought television was allowed to do, and then keeps that promise for years afterwards.

The characters carry it. Almost nobody is written as purely good or purely villainous, and several of the people you most want dead in season 1 become people you are actively rooting for by season 4. That takes patient writing, and the show had the runway to pull it off.

If you like intense, grounded, morally complicated drama, this is still one of the best examples. Just know exactly what you are signing up for.

Where the Map Ran Out

Here is the structural reason for the decline, and it is not a mystery.

The show is adapted from George R.R. Martin's novels, and it was burning through roughly one book a season. Martin published the fifth book in 2011, the same year the show premiered. By the end of season 5 in 2015, the series had caught up to everything he had written.

On the first day of 2016, Martin posted publicly that the next book would not be finished before season 6 aired. He had missed a deadline, then missed the extension, and he said so directly. That meant season 6 was the first season with no completed novel underneath it, and from there the show was working from an outline and its own invention.

Look at the ratings again with that in mind. The 10/10 block is the fully adapted material. The 8/10 block is the transition. Everything after is the show writing without a net.

This is not to say adaptation is the only thing that makes writing good. It is to say that the specific strengths this show was famous for, the long setups and the consequences that land years later, are exactly the strengths that require someone to have planned it out in advance. Remove that, and you keep the budget and the cast and lose the thing people actually came for.

Thirteen Episodes to Land a Plane

The second structural reason gets less attention and might matter more.

Seasons 1 through 6 ran ten episodes each. Sixty episodes to set everything up. Season 7 was cut to seven episodes and season 8 to six, leaving thirteen to resolve it all.

That was a choice, and not the network's. HBO wanted more. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss announced in 2016 that they were down to a final thirteen episodes and heading into the last lap. The network's programming president said openly that as an executive and as a fan he wished they had asked for another six years, and that he hoped it could be worked out. It was not. The showrunners said they could no longer produce ten episodes a year to the standard they had set, given how much each episode had grown.

You can respect that reasoning and still see the result. Storylines built across sixty episodes had thirteen to resolve. Travel that used to take a season started taking a scene. Character turns that needed a year of groundwork got a single episode. Season 8 is not badly made; it is visibly the most expensive television ever produced at the time, and that is part of what makes it such a strange object. It looks magnificent, and it is narratively incoherent.

The Reaction Was Its Own Event

By the end, a Change.org petition asking HBO to remake the final season with different writers had passed 1.7 million signatures. It was never going to happen, and most people signing knew it. It was a vote, not a request.

The strangest part of the aftermath is that season 8 still collected Emmy nominations, including for its most poorly received episode, and the show finished its run with more Emmy wins than any drama series in history. That gap between what the industry rewarded and what the audience experienced is its own small piece of television history.

My Warning to Anyone Starting Now

Do not get emotionally invested.

I mean that as practical advice, not cynicism. Watch it for what it is doing well, appreciate the craft, and keep a little distance from the outcome. I did not do this, and I was genuinely low for weeks after the finale, which is an absurd thing to admit about a fantasy show and also completely true.

Go in knowing the last two seasons are weak. Knowing in advance protects you, because the damage doesn't come from the bad episodes themselves. It comes from expecting them to be good.

The Verdict

Watch it. Watch it knowing where it goes.

Seasons 1 through 6 are worth the time on their own terms, and nothing is stopping you from treating the ending as optional. If you do watch it through, there is something genuinely fascinating in it from a purely analytical angle: a case study in how a show with the best writing on television, the largest budget, and an enormous head start can still come apart, and in exactly which pieces give way first.

Not many shows are worth studying for both reasons. This one is.