HBO
HBO’s spectacular show, Game of Thrones, is about to kick off its fifth season. The previous season was universally lauded as one of its best and the previous three have garnered tremendous praise.
As of right now, showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have been pretty consistently clear that they’d like the show to end in seven seasons.
But it sounds like HBO wouldn’t be quite content with letting its most popular show ever just up and stop. Not when it could be making scads and scads and scads more money. From Entertainment Weekly:
“This is the hard part of what we do,” sighs HBO programming president Michael Lombardo. “We started this journey with David and Dan. It’s their vision. Would I love the show to go 10 years as both a fan and a network executive? Absolutely.”
Of course, while more Thrones is awesome, I think we’d all much rather have it stop in 2017, instead of having to wait all the way to 2020. Could you imagine that? Not knowing what will become of Jon and Daernarys until the next decade? Hell no. And would they have to push back the arrival of Winter? I’m getting fucking tired of waiting for it already. It’s been four years.
Also, how will Maisie Williams continue to play Arya if that’s the case? She’ll be 45 be then (not precisely).
Still, it sounds like the showrunners have all the power here. As they should, because for as good as this show has been, it doesn’t take much difficulty to see where it could go stale. Looking at you again, Winter. Just come already.
So if the producers prefer seven seasons and HBO prefers more, what happens? A conversation. Perhaps more than one. Like amicable spouses who avoid a sensitive area of disagreement, this issue is something HBO and the showrunners haven’t discussed thus far (“So about season seven–” / “Hey look, a dragon!”). “We’ll have an honest conversation that explores all possible avenues,” Lombardo says. “If they weren’t comfortable going beyond seven seasons, I trust them implicitly and trust that’s the right decision—as horrifying as that is to me. What I’m not going to do is have a show continue past where the creators believe where they feel they’ve finished with the story.”
Meanwhile, George RR Martin best get to writing, unless he wants everyone to know the ending before he publishes the last two books. Sales might plummet.
Actually, that’s already gonna be the case. Dude is a plodding novelist.