Craig Mazin has been working in TV for years, but only recently made his mark as a guy who creates new shows. In 2019, he won accolades for his work on Chernobyl, a drama about the 1986 nuclear disaster. Now he’s the guy behind The Last of Us, HBO’s adaptation of Naughty Dog’s zombie video game series.
HBO is positioning The Last of Us as one of its big new shows for 2023, so Mazin’s profile is only likely to rise from here. But he’s been an important part of the team for a long time. For instance, he was one of the guys who saw the original, unaired Game of Thrones pilots back in the day, and was uncommonly forthright about how much he thought it sucked.
Some background: long before Game of Thrones became an international phenomenon, first-time showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss made a pilot. They showed it off to friends and family, and the responses were not encouraging. “You listen to how sharply the pitch of somebody’s voice turns up when they tell you it’s good,” Weiss explained in the behind-the-scenes book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon. “‘It’s good!’ How much higher than their average register is the word ‘good’? That’s a gauge of how f—ed you are. Our ‘good’ was in dog-whistle territory.”
How The Last of Us showrunner helped save Game of Thrones
People found it boring, or didn’t get the plot; some folk didn’t realize that Jaime and Cersei Lannister were brother and sister, which took all the air out of the end-of-episode reveal that they were sleeping together. But unlike many of the people Benioff and Weiss showed the pilot to, Mazin did more than just say “good” in a suspiciously high-pitched voice. “There were others who weren’t trying to be nice but were actually trying to be helpful,” Weiss said. “Craig Mazin told us: ‘You guys have a massive problem.'”
And indeed they did. So Benioff and Weiss recast important parts, reshot big chunks of the pilot, and eventually released “Winter Is Coming,” which laid the foundation for Game of Thrones.
Might the show have benefited from Benioff and Weiss screening the controversial final episodes for Craig Mazin before they aired? Maybe, but that’s not what we’re talking about. The point is that Mazin’s instincts were right early on in the life of Game of Thrones. Let’s hope they prove as dead-on for his own show.
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h/t Looper