George R.R. Martin was “out of the loop” for later seasons of Game of Thrones
By Dan Selcke
It’s not an uncommon opinion that the later seasons of Game of Thrones weren’t as strong as the earlier ones. It’s also not a particularly nuanced opinion. I’d agree that the final four seasons of the show were less internally coherent than the first four, with the eighth and final season getting the lion’s share of criticism. But the back half of the show also had some of its most memorable moments, like the destruction of the Sept of Baelor or the Loot Train Attack. Overall, I think the back half of Game of Thrones was less consistent but more spectacular, for better and worse.
That shift in focus also roughly coincides with when A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin stopped being quite as involved in the direction the show was taking; season 4 was the last time he wrote an episode script, for example. “By Season 5 and 6, and certainly 7 and 8, I was pretty much out of the loop,” he told The New York Times in a new interview. When asked why he pulled back, he said, “I don’t know — you have to ask [Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss].”
In any case, Martin is providing guidance on the new Game of Thrones successor show House of the Dragon, which is adapted from his book Fire & Blood. So far, the new show looks to be sticking very close to the source material. “George, for us, in this process has been a really valuable resource,” HBO executive Casey Bloys told the Times. “He is literally the creator of this world. He is its historian, its creator, its keeper. And so I can’t imagine doing a show that he didn’t believe in or didn’t endorse.”
Why did George R.R. Martin stop consulting on Game of Thrones?
We can think of at least one reason Martin wasn’t as involved in Game of Thrones in its later seasons: he was trying to make headway on The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth book in his saga. He’s talked before about how writing scripts takes a good amount of time for him, and given that The Winds of Winter is, by his own admission, “very, very late,” it’s probably time he couldn’t afford to give up. He’s not writing scripts for House of the Dragon, either.
In fact, Martin even cited this as the reason he was pulling back from Game of Thrones in a 2015 blog post published shortly before the premiere of the fifth season:
"[A]fter wrestling with it for a month or so, I’ve decided not to script an episode for season six of GAME OF THRONES. Writing a script takes me three weeks, minimum, and longer when it is not a straight adaptation from the novels. And really, it would cost me more time than that, since I have never been good at changing gears from one medium to another and back again. Writing a season six script would cost me a month’s work on WINDS, and maybe as much as six weeks, and I cannot afford that. With David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Bryan Cogman on board, the scriptwriting chores for season six should be well covered. My energies are best devoted to WINDS."
Does that contradict what he told The New York Times? You be the judge. And in any case, the strategy didn’t bear much fruit, because fans are still waiting for Winds over a decade since A Dance With Dragons was published in 2011. And there’s at least one more book to go after that.
Recently, Martin has been more open about how the ending of his saga will diverge from the ending of Game of Thrones. He reiterated that to the Times, saying, “My ending will be very different.”
Next. The 3 things George R.R. Martin asked be included in House of the Dragon. dark
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