Game of Thrones Emmy submission snubs
By Dan Selcke
“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” for Outstanding Writing For A Drama Series
Okay, real talk: a lot of people have criticized the writing of Game of Thrones season 8. The series finale, “The Iron Throne,” has taken an especially large amount of heat, so it’s surprising that it’s the only episode HBO submitted in the category of Outstanding Writing For A Drama Series.
What didn’t people like about the finale? There’s a lot we could talk about, but in particular, no one seemed to be buying what writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were selling when it came to Bran being named king. And on a structural level, the episode is awkwardly divided into two halves, the first ending when Drogon burns the Iron Throne and flies away with Daenerys’ body. If I can be an armchair screenwriter for a moment, I think the smart writing decision would have been to split those halves into two episodes. That would have let the big moments breathe a little, and Benioff and Weiss could have added some badly needed supplementary material to the back half. Just a few more minutes of selling us on why Bran would make a good king (and how and why people would vote for him) could have done a lot.
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On the flip side, I think most fans would agree that the second episode of the season, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” was easily the best-written of the bunch. Scenes breathe here. We actually have the space to enjoy moments like Daenerys confronting Sansa, or Arya becoming intimate with Gendry, or Jaime knighting Brienne. This definitely should have been the episode HBO put forward in the writing category.
And I’ll point out that Benioff and Weiss had a lot to do with why “Knight” is so good. Bryan Cogman is the credited writer, but TV shows aren’t like movies; everything is heavily outlined by the showrunners and their team ahead of time, although Cogman certainly deserves credit for bringing that outline wonderfully to life.