How Game of Thrones beat the odds to get made

Game of Thrones is one TV’s great successes, and it was nearly cancelled before it got made. Ten years on, we look back at how it nearly didn’t make it to the small screen.

Call the banners: it’s Game of Thrones anniversary month!

It’s hard to believe, but the series premiere of Game of Thrones aired 10 years ago this month, on April 17, 2011. The first episode, “Winter Is Coming,” garnered around 2.2 million viewers in ratings for its initial broadcast — a respectable amount, but not one that gave any hint of the record-shattering numbers the show would get in later seasons. Yet the fact that the show premiered at all was an astounding achievement in itself. While Thrones’ run would be defined by countless instances of beating the odds and overcoming production challenges, there is perhaps no better example than the saga of how the show got made in the first place.

To celebrate the premiere’s 10-year anniversary, we’re taking a look back at the myriad obstacles the show had to overcome to get to our television screens. Please note before we start that a great deal of the information and quotes in this article are sourced from Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon by James Hibberd. Hibberd is the writer for Entertainment Weekly who covered Thrones for its entire eight-season run. He had unparalleled access to the cast, crew and production team. If you want to take a deep, celebratory dive into the show’s production, Hibberd’s book is the most comprehensive recounting out there.

It’s especially fascinating in regards to the light it sheds on the show getting its initial lease on life…because right from the start, everything about Game of Thrones was a long shot.

A Song of Ice and Fire

It all begins with the books, of course. George R.R. Martin already had a long career by the time he released A Game of Thrones back in 1996. He had penned several science fiction and horror novels as well as a multitude of shorter works, including the award winning (and soon-to-be adapted) novelette Sandkings. In 1991, fresh off a seven-year streak working in Hollywood as a screenwriter, Martin returned to writing novels, starting with this idea he had for an epic fantasy series.

Tired of the constant creative compromises and limitations that are an unavoidable part of the television industry, Martin set to work on A Song of Ice and Fire with the mindset of writing an “unfilmable” story: one as large as his imagination, with thousands of characters, a deep and intricate history, and a world every bit as vivid as any real place.

No small order to make a television show out of, right?

Fast forward to the mid-2000s, when studios were ravenous for fantasy stories to dovetail off the success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. By that point, Martin had released four novels in A Song of Ice and Fire, and many studios were calling to adapt it. None had the kind of vision the author was hoping for, however. His novels were each around 1,000 pages long, and featured an incredibly large and complex cast of characters.

“The answers I got back [from studios] were not ones I wanted to hear,” Martin recollected to Hibberd. One example of such an answer? “Jon Snow is the central character, we’ll focus on him and cut the rest away.”

I shudder to think what ill-fated future we might live in had any of those adaptations come to pass.

It was during this time that Martin’s agent sent a copy of A Game of Thrones to David Benioff, an up-and-coming screenwriter. Benioff, whose biggest credit up to that point was the screenplay for the movie Troy, devoured the books and fell in love with the story. He then got his writing partner Dan Weiss on board and together they set up a meeting with Martin to discuss adapting the novels.

The Meetings

That initial meeting between George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, and Dan Weiss lasted for hours and laid the initial groundwork for Game of Thrones. Yet while it seemed to go well, there was one crucial moment where it all could have come undone. As Martin remembered:

"I did famously ask them the question “Who is Jon Snow’s mother?” They said they read the books. I wanted to see if they had really read the books and how much they had paid attention."

Luckily, Benioff and Weiss brought a genuine passion for the series to the pitch meeting. They correctly answered this question — back in the day, mind you, when it was not common knowledge but the kind of theory you were most likely to find in internet forums or a World of Warcraft guild chat. As a result, the author gave them his blessing to adapt his story.

But that gathering was only the first of many. From there, Benioff and Weiss would take Thrones through a marathon series of meetings to determine its fate, starting with someone who had been dubbed, I kid you not, “the scariest person in Hollywood”: then-HBO programming president Carolyn Strauss, who had a reputation as a no-nonsense businessperson with a sharp eye for developing content.

Weiss and Benioff aced that meeting. They even made Strauss laugh, something they had been advised not to expect. Pre-production started moving forward; Game of Thrones was getting made!

Until it hit its next snag. Strauss stepped down as programming president. And when there’s a leadership change at a network like HBO, often the projects left over from the previous management are in danger of being scrapped. Weiss and Benioff then had to convince new programming president Michael Lombardo and HBO co-president Richard Plepler to support the show.

Again, they managed it, a fact which is all the more impressive when you take into consideration that Weiss and Benioff, though talented writers, had no TV experience whatsoever. Yet they convinced some of the most seasoned executives in television to invest $10 million in a pilot for a show in a completely untested market. Gritty, adult fantasy shows hadn’t really been done before — the genre was mainly confined to lighter fare like Xena: Warrior Princess and The Beastmaster.

Michael Lombardo got an extra boost of confidence when he happened to spot Dan Weiss reading “a dog-eared copy” of A Game of Thrones at the gym, and was so impressed by the passion the showrunners were bringing to the project he decided to push for it. “He didn’t know I saw him,” Lombardo remembered. “And I thought, ‘We’re going to figure this out. These guys breathe this show in a way that doesn’t happen all the time.'”

And so, production started moving forward again…Game of Thrones was finally going to film a pilot episode!

What could go wrong?

The Pilot

Much has been said about the infamous Game of Thrones pilot. The above picture of George R.R. Martin and Ian McNeice, who was originally cast to play Ilyrio Mopatis, is one of the few images to survive from the many scenes that were eventually cut or reshot. The episode was so badly received by test viewers and execs that it nearly killed the show in its crib.

And that’s not even taking into consideration the gargantuan task of casting. We might take it for granted now with all the success that Game of Thrones has had, but at the time the cast was a very hard sell. It’s difficult to find good child actors who can display a range of emotion, and Thrones needed a whole bunch of them, many of whom would be expected to carry major stories for seasons at a time. It also had an enormous amount of speaking parts and named characters; remember, Martin set out to write a story that was more-or-less unfilmable, and the huge cast was a part of that.

Entire pages could be written about this pilot, and in his book Hibberd does spill a lot of ink hashing out all the things that went wrong. Take, for example, the fact that Winterfell was originally filmed in Doune Castle…aka. the very familiar-looking castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Or that the wardrobe was off, looking far too “new” and not authentic for the kind of period piece the crew was making. Or that the original White Walker costumes were terrible, because Weiss, Benioff, and their assistant Brian Cogman had never made a TV show before, and didn’t realize that fixing the White Walker’s costumes with CG in post-production was “an enormously expensive approach to the problem [they had].”

There were other issues as well, ranging from bad haircuts, to uncooperative weather, to a horse that got aroused and ruined shots for a sex scene between Jason Mamoa and Tamzin Merchant, who was originally cast as Daenerys Targaryen before Emilia Clarke was brought in to replace her.

Needless to say, by the time the pilot was brought before the HBO executives, things were looking pretty dicey.

A Second Chance

The initial screening of the Game of Thrones pilot went about as well as you’d expect. If ever there was a point where the fate of the show hung in the balance, this was it.

Dan Weiss recalled waiting to hear the fate of the show, knowing there was a “52/48 chance” that they had messed up the opportunity. He called it “one of the most horrible feelings I can remember.”

Fortunately, Michael Lombardo and the other HBO executives saw what the show could be from the pilot. And Weiss and Benioff, to their credit, stepped up to the plate, owned what went wrong and laid out how they would fix it, which helped seal the deal.

So HBO ordered a season of Game of Thrones, as well as a total reshoot of the pilot episode. They recast several roles, including leads Daenerys Targaryen and Catelyn Stark (who was played by Jennifer Ehle in the pilot, to be replaced by Michelle Fairley). Veteran HBO director Tim Van Patten was brought in to helm the pilot reshoots, replacing Tom McCarthy.

But best of all for fans, HBO urged the showrunners to go bigger with the show, to capture more of the scope of the series in order to make it feel more epic. Granted, it’s doubtful they had any idea just how enormous the show’s battles would be by the end, but that push helped aim Game of Thrones in the right direction. The result of this tumultuous process was the first season of one of the biggest television phenomenons of all time.

In the words of Craig Maizan, the producer who had previously advised Benioff and Weiss that their pilot was in serious trouble, “[It was] the biggest rescue in Hollywood history.”

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