Once in a while one gets to read half-hearted retrospective pieces about how bad the final season was compared to the earlier iterations. It is not as though the show has been erased from the popular imagination completely. It’s downright astonishing as to how it crumbled almost overnight as a pop culture behemoth to something people are sort of embarrassed to bring up for the fear of being ridiculed. Game of Thrones was a global phenomenon - until it wasn’t. Despite what happened at the end, it still took home a record 59 Emmys, the most for any TV drama ever. After every episode aired, we took to social media to discuss and brainstorm as to whether a particular line spoken casually was secretly a revelation, or some such.Īlso Read | Game of Thrones season 8 review: A primer on how to ruin a perfectly good TV showĪlmost everybody we knew was watching it, and those who did not were banished to the sidelines, rendered social pariahs by their refusal to partake in what looked like TV event of the time. It was dominating the discourse everywhere, be it social media or get-togethers.
It took its time, but by the time Ilyn Payne had beheaded Ned Stark towards the end of the first season, the world was hooked. It was truly a humongous pop culture sensation. Game of Thrones was the biggest thing in the world for most of its life. Long episode runtimes, often deliberate pacing and the herculean task of keeping up with such a huge number of characters and plot threads deterred few of us. The quasi-mediaeval setting allowed the story to be about, mainly, power-struggle, between not just noble houses like Starks and Lannisters but between individuals, with all the requisite murders, betrayals, backstabbing and so on. The show had a cast of hundreds of characters, and thanks largely to the immense depth of its plotting, world-building, consistently excellent dialogue, and top notch casting, Game of Thrones cast a spell upon us, every week from spring to summer. While White Walkers, direwolves and dragons made for admittedly impressive spectacle, the biggest reason most of us watched Game of Thrones was the human drama.
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