I have made it clear numerous times
on this column that I have no patience for Game
of Thrones. I think it’s ridiculously violent, overly sexual, and so
misogynistic towards its younger female characters that I’m rather amazed
#MeToo never set up a criticism. But my biggest problem with the series is that
for more than a decade, it has dominated the Emmy nominations and awards so
much that a lot of my favorite series have basically been denies any form of
recognition during its run.
So understandably, I was upset when
the Emmys gave the series 32 nominations this year – a record for any program.
What makes this even more remarkable is that throughout the final six episodes,
the cacophony from critics and many of the series biggest boosters was at a
crescendo before the final episode. Now
this doesn’t necessarily mean that the series will win again (I’ll get to my
logic there in the article), but it does kind of beg the question: why are the
Emmy judges, especially in the middle of the Golden Age determined to
over-recognize a final season that not only destroyed many fans faith in the
series, but made just as many question why they watched the series in the first
place?
Now, as a historian of television
in general, and of the last twenty years in particular, I decided to see if
there was another angle to this that other commentators and bloggers have not
yet approached. So I decided to consider, has this kind of overreaction to a
final season have any historical precedent? In order to do so, I decided that I
would compare Game of Thrones final
season, to four other series that have claim to the list greatest of all time,
received a considerable amount of recognition from the Emmys, how they handled
the build up to the final season, and how that final episode played out. I will
then compare and contrast them to the last season of Game of Thrones.
The four series I have selected
are, in order of their premiere dates, The
Sopranos, Lost, Mad Men, and Breaking
Bad.
(Note: I am assuming that everybody
in the world knows at least some of the details of how these five series played
out. For those of you who don’t: Decade
Old Spoiler Warnings Ahead!)
1. How
the Final Season Was Planned
The
Sopranos: David Chase announced in late 2004 that the sixth season would be
the last and HBO would air 16 episodes over two years.
Lost:
Showrunners Damon Lindelof and
Carlton Cuse announced in 2007 that there would be three final seasons, each
sixteen episodes long, concluding in 2010.
Mad
Men: Showrunner Matt Weiner planned for the show to end after seven
seasons. AMC eventually decided to split the seventh season into two seasons of
seven episodes each, ending in May 2015 because…
Breaking
Bad: Showrunner Vince Gilligan decided to air Season 5 in two blocks of
eight episodes, which concluded in October of 2013.
Game
of Thrones: Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss decided, after much
debate to end the series after eight seasons. Season 7 aired in June of 2017,
Season 8 started in April of this year.
2. Did
the Writers Have A Plan?
The
Sopranos: It’s hard to say. One of the many things that made The Sopranos a groundbreaker is that so
much of the series had no overarching narrative. Chase and his co-writers were
notorious for planning to have major characters be at the center of later
seasons, only to kill them off before they reached their full potential.
Lost:
Cuse and Lindelof went to great detail to say that they the final season mostly
planned out by the time they got there, but while they were writing it, they
cut bait on a lot of ideas. For example, the Temple storyline
Mad
Men: Yes. Matthew Weiner had always planned to end the series with the end
of the 1960s.
Breaking
Bad: Yes. Gilligan opened the first part of Season 5 with a flashforward
that played out in the final episode, and ended that same sequence with Hank
finally learned that Walter White was Heisenberg.
Game
of Thrones: In theory, Benioff and Weiss were working off the notes that
George R.R. Martin had for A Song of Ice
and Fire. But they had left the books in a couple of key instances in the
fifth season, so it’s hard to say for sure.
3. How
Did Critics and Fans React to The Last Season Initially?
The
Sopranos: Mostly critics were impressed. There was disappointment with some
storylines (Vito in New Hampshire
Lost:
What is generally forgotten is how much fans were taken up with the
flash-sideways timeline at least for the first half of the season. Ab Aeterno,
the episode which reveals Richard Alpert’s history is considered one of the
greatest episodes in the shows history. The problems began in The Candidate,
when Sayid, Jin and Sun were killed in the sub explosion. After that, there was
a real backlash.
Mad
Men: Harder to measure because Mad
Men had been one of those series that built up over the course of a
thirteen episode season, and now they were cut in half. Still, the general
consensus is by the middle of the second half, the show was firing on all
cylinders.
Breaking
Bad: Worked all the way. Watching Walter White finally complete his rise to
power was exceptional TV. And the second half of the final season may be the
greatest final season of any series in history. Some critics have mentioned
that any one of the last four episodes could easily have served as a final
episode, and fans would’ve been satisfied.
Game
of Thrones: Fans and critics started complaining almost immediately. There
had been gripes in the penultimate group of six episodes that the characters
were starting to act afield. But when the final contestants for the Iron Throne
began to campaign, people started to get royally pissed. They thought the romantic storylines were not
playing out, they didn’t like how the alliances were being arranged, and they
were incredibly angry that Danerys Targeyen, the character that had spent much
of the series being built up as the heroine of the story, turned into a monster
in the final few episodes. By the time of episode 5, there was a petition
online signed by nearly a quarter of a million fans of the show demanded that
HBO reshoot the final season.
4. How
The Ending Played Out
The
Sopranos: When the show ended, or didn’t, millions at home wonder if the
cable had gone out before Tony got shot. Even now, people are still arguing
what happened, and David Chase will not enlighten anyone. The overall effect
was that many people consider the ending diminished the series as a whole,
though time has been a lot kinder to it than many of the others.
Lost:
Oh boy. It’s been nearly a decade, and people are still pissed off about it
ended. To the point that Lindelof and Cuse keep getting hate mail. There are
those like Nikki Stafford, who thought that the final episode really did make
sense, and helped bring the show to a satisfying conclusion, and there are
those like Emily Nussbaum, who believe the entire series came down to a fight
over a glowing cave and a bereavement holodeck. I have a feeling no one’s ever
going to be happy with this.
Mad
Men: As a general rule, critics were satisfied with how many of the
individual storylines (Joan’s opening her own business; Roger settling down
with a woman his own age) But the final shot of Don Draper seemingly using his
enlightenment to come up with the idea of a Coke commercial, there are a fair
amount of fans angry.
Breaking
Bad: About the only complaint anyone gave about Felina was that it was
Ozymandias, which many people (myself included) consider one of the greatest TV
episodes ever made. Still, seeing Walter tell Skyler: “I did it for me. I liked
it. I was good at it. It made me feel alive” is still one of the greatest
moments in TV history.
Game
of Thrones: The nuclear fallout from The Iron Throne is still descending.
But I think it’s safe to say that the writers have royally screwed up. It’s one
thing to isolate the critics. It’s one thing to alienate the fans. But when
your lead actress tells magazines she doesn’t like how her character’s arc
played out, you’ve reached a special level of mucking it up. The only series on
this list with a similar level of controversy over its ending is Lost, and even now, nearly a decade
later, none of the cast has ever publicly commented that they were disappointed
with how the show ended. This is, to quote some friends of mine, next level
shit.
There’s one last aspect about the
final episode of Game of Thrones that
I’d like to note for this article, and that as the official fan ranking for the
series at imdb.com
Now, while imdb.com has many
virtues, I’m not always wild about their system of ranking television. This is,
after all, a system that has so few safeguards its easy to imagine the millions
of die-hard fans coming aboard to buck up a series they love against all
reason. However, that very shortcoming may illustrate better than anything else
just how badly Game of Thrones screwed
the dragon.
For comparison, I’ll list the final
marks for the four series finales I previously mentioned:
The
Sopranos, ‘Made in America ’:
9.2
Lost,
The End: 8.2
Mad
Men, Person to Person: 9.3
Breaking
Bad, ‘Felina’: 9.9
And for Game of Thrones, The Iron Throne’ (drum roll please…) 4.2.
Consider that for a very long
moment. Some of the most divisive finales in history were still regarded very
highly by their fan base. But ‘The Iron Throne’ was so loathed that it has the
rating of badly made porn movies. Hell, this is literally at the same score
that Plan 9 From Outer Space. Which means this episode was considered
nearly as bad as the worst film ever made.
And it’s actually more astounding
than that. For the previous four series finales, I mentioned, the average number
of critics was between 1500 for Mad Men and
75 thousand for Breaking Bad. ‘The Iron Throne’ had over two hundred thousand people critiquing
the final episode. It’s pretty clear that even the most rapid of Game of Thrones followers, the writers
clearly and truly took a dragon-sized dump on what millions previously had
considered one of the greatest series of all time.
So, if critics hated how the series
ended, and the fans loathed how the series ended, why the hell did the Emmys go
so overboard to recognize the show with 32 nominations? I’ve racked my brain
for weeks trying to come up with a solution, and I can come up with only one
plausible explanation.
The narrative coming out of Hollywood for the nearly
two years leading up to the final season of Game
of Thrones was that this was going to be a flashpoint in modern culture. Game of Thrones was, in the minds of
many, the last true ‘water cooler’ series we would ever see on TV, the last
show that would be a critical and ratings hit for the entire world. (I could
make a strong counter argument for The
West Wing or Lost, but let’s that
go.) When it came to an end, it would be the end of an era for television. And
when the final season turned out to be one of the biggest disappointments in
the history of television, the Emmys decided, why let the facts get in the way
of a good story?
That and the overall laziness of
the Academy voters in general. As I have mentioned over and over, Emmy voters
have the habit of nominating the same series year after year, no matter how
much the quality of the series declines. It was true for House of Cards, for Will
& Grace, and The West Wing (the
series whose record the Emmys broke), and there’s no particular reason the
Emmys should stop now when they’re considerably behind the curve.
So, this begs the question: will
the Emmys follow their own track record, and decide to give Best Drama to the
final season that alienated people so much that any hope HBO has of continuing
the franchise in prequels may be seriously damaged?
Well, let’s consider as an example
the four previous series. It worked for The
Sopranos, which prevailed in 2007. (Hell, the voters even gave ‘Made in America ’ the
Best Writing award.) They were more than willing to give Breaking Bad its due. However, the final season of Mad Men didn’t do as well (mainly
because Game of Thrones was the big
winner the last year.) Lost had its best year at the Emmys,
getting twelve nominations, but the stigma of the finale may have loomed so
large that the Emmys didn’t recognize it. (Then again, the competition included
Breaking Bad and Mad Men both of which had enjoyed superlative seasons, so it’s hard
to say here.)
Casual observers may say: well the
Emmys gave the show 32 nominations, so it’s a done deal. But this is not necessarily
the case. The series that set the original record that Game of Thrones broke – NYPD
Blue in 1994 – was an even larger groundbreaker than Game of Thrones ever was. Yet it ended up losing Best Drama to Picket Fences that year. The very next
season ER - which was a far bigger
popular success than Game of Thrones can
ever claim to be – got twenty nominations, but lost Best Drama – to NYPD Blue. The Emmys is notorious for
setting up overwhelming favorites in the nominations, and then having them end
up doing very badly when it comes to the big prize. Game of Thrones knows that better than most: during the years the
series was at its peak – the first four seasons – it would constantly dominate
the nominations, but end up losing –twice to Breaking Bad.
And there are signs that many
critics feel the same way. As I mentioned in an earlier article, the TV Critics
Association chose not to even nominate the series for Best Drama and give its
top prize to Better Call Saul. The Peabodys chose to honor Killing Eve and Pose. And earlier this year, the SAG Awards chose to give their top
prize to This is Us. All of these
series are up for Best Drama, and all have a better argument for winning than Game of Thrones does, much of which
comes down to Game of Thrones has won
three times. None of them have.
So, is it likely that Game of Thrones is going to end up
winning the prize for Best Drama in about six weeks? Unfortunately, it is. But
it is possible that Emmy voters, having seen the episode, and more importantly,
knowing just how bad the critical response is, might decide to go with another,
better series? You can’t rule it out, which is one of the reasons I like the
Emmys so much. Let’s hope that they remember the Starbucks cup in Westeros
before they decide just how great this series was.
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