Game of Thrones fans are a passionate bunch, quick to heap praise on the show when something awesome happens and to offer constructive criticism when they’re not feeling it. Watching season 7, many fans dinged the show for pacing issues, with characters warping all over the map to the point where people were joking about everyone having jet packs.
There were lots of examples. Euron Greyjoy traveled from the Iron Islands to King’s Landing to Casterly Rock and back, Jon Snow was zipping up and down the coast like a speedboat…you get the idea. Entertainment Weekly spoke to the show’s writers to get their takes on this, including co-executive producer Bryan Cogman. “We made a choice to ‘just get on with it’ last season,” he said. “You can sit at home and do the math on how long it took to get the boats from Point A to Point B and whatever that was, yeah, that’s what it was. There’s always something everybody has got to graft on to and I guess that outrage was better than others, so I’ll take it.”
Okay, so Cogman isn’t super-duper engaging with the criticism. How does showrunner Dan Weiss feel about it?
"We don’t read a lot of that stuff. If somebody says, ‘I don’t like the way you do this,’ I have no idea what percentage of the people watching that opinion actually represents. If that opinion happens to surface louder on the internet, I still have no idea — it could be 1 percent of people that becomes an internet thing for 10 minutes and then it just seems like it’s more than 1 percent. But there’s no way of telling — nor am I interested in finding a way of finding out — how accurate those thoughts represent the broad spectrum of people watching. If you start thinking about that you’ll drive yourself crazy."
I do 100% understand this point. These guys are running a multi-million dollar operation. They’re making dozens of difficult high-stakes decisions every day, and they don’t have the time or the emotional bandwidth to dive into the vast ocean of opinion on the internet and separate the useful advice from the cacophonous noise. That’s a full-time job in itself.
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All that said, writer Dave Hill sounds like he has his ear a little closer to the ground. “You obviously don’t want any criticism of any kind,” he said. “But with all the things we were balancing to set things up for season 8, sometimes we had to speed things up within episodes.”
"We had a lot of time cuts the vast majority of viewers didn’t catch. We could have a [title card] on there saying ‘Three Weeks Later,’ but we did not. Sometimes when moving pieces around you’re going to cheat a little bit. [For season 8], we tried to keep more of the time logic rather than jet packs."
We won’t know for sure until we’ve seen the final six episodes, but when we look back, I’m betting that season 7 very much plays like Part One of a two-part story, with season 8 as the climax.
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What do you all think of these answers?
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