15 years later, Game of Thrones writer Bryan Cogman gets achingly candid looking back on his iconic first episode

Bryan Cogman was not supposed to write Game of Thrones. He had no produced credits, no formal television writing experience, and by his own account fully expected that the script he turned in for season 1's fourth episode was just a training exercise. Then David Benioff called him the next morning.

"Well," Benioff told him, "you just wrote Episode 4 of Game of Thrones."

This past weekend marked 15 years since the episode "Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things" aired on HBO. Cogman marked the occasion with a lengthy thread on Bluesky, candid about the chaos, the luck and the peculiar chain of events that turned an assistant into one of the most important writers the show ever had.

It started with a spreadsheet

Before Cogman wrote a single line of dialogue, his value to the production was encyclopedic knowledge. When Game of Thrones was in pre-production in 2009, the creative team as in the directors, department heads and designers needed to get up to speed on George R.R. Martin's sprawling mythology fast.

Cogman typed up family trees, character breakdowns, histories of the kingdoms and digestible primers on the show's religions and lore.

"I became considered the in-house 'expert,'" he wrote, "though I would never have classified myself as such."

It got him into every meeting. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss took notice and Cogman says he first learned they had bigger plans for him through an unlikely document. It was the letter they drafted to UK immigration to secure his work visa as an "essential" member of the production. The letter said they intended to make him a producer on the show one day.

"A debt I can never repay," he wrote.

Notably, Cogman is clear-eyed about what that opportunity represents in the current scene.

"It saddens me that there are productions who undoubtedly use ChatGPT now to get this kind of stuff done, instead of utilizing an eager, hard-working, creative assistant," he wrote. "It's not lost on me that there are many kids starting out who won't get the opportunities I did."

"I assumed it was an exercise"

When Benioff and Weiss handed Cogman the assignment to write episode four, he did not treat it as a career-defining moment because he did not believe it was one. The season had already been broken by the three of them together, so he had a solid structure to work from. He turned the script around in a few days.

"If I'd known I was writing Episode 4 of a brand new HBO show when first given the assignment," he wrote, "I'd probably still be writing it."

HBO had asked Benioff and Weiss to bring on freelance writers to help with the scripts. The writers' room that season included George R.R. Martin himself and Buffy veteran Jane Espenson. Cogman had none of their credentials. When Benioff and Weiss vouched for him to the network anyway, HBO did not push back. "They felt like a rep company in those days," Cogman wrote. "The creatives and execs truly felt like collaborators. It ain't always that way."

Sneaking in Bran's dreams

The moment in the episode Cogman is most proud of almost wasn't there at all.

During season prep, there were real concerns about how to handle Bran Stark's wolf dreams and visions. HBO was cautious as this was the network's first genuine foray into high fantasy, and there was institutional pressure to keep the supernatural elements minimal.

"There were no Bran visions in the original outline," Cogman wrote. But he decided to write one anyway. "F**k it, I'll write it anyway," as he put it.

What he came up with was the three-eyed raven sequence: "Not too fantastical, but enough to signal where we were going."

Rather than cutting the scene, Benioff and Weiss kept it and changed Bran's entire arc for the season as a result. "There are bosses who would read a scene that wasn't in the outline and go 'What the hell? We didn't tell you to write this,'" Cogman wrote. "Then there are bosses like D&D, who kept it in."

The wild west of season 1

Filming episodes 3 and 4 before episodes 1 and 2 was unusual, but unavoidable. Large portions of the original pilot needed to be reshot, three key roles had been recast and director Tim Van Patten was still finishing Boardwalk Empire. So the production started in the middle, figuring things out under director Brian Kirk as they went.

"It really was the Wild West," Cogman wrote. "D&D were first-time showrunners and Belfast had only recently become a production hub, so many people on our crew hadn't worked on a large-scale production like this before."

The weather made everything harder. Belfast delivered what Cogman recalls as the worst conditions of all eight seasons with constant rain that ate into shooting time and forced scenes to be cut. Then the rough assemblies came back clocking around 40 minutes. Too short.

So Cogman, Benioff and Weiss wrote new scenes with dialogue only, standing sets, no extras, no action, to fill the gaps. The constraint produced some of the season's best work. The scene of Robert and Cersei taking stock of their marriage, Cogman notes, "would never happen in the book" but became central to how the show's version of Cersei was ultimately shown.

There were smaller fires too. Arriving on set for the tournament sequence one morning, Cogman found the art department had hung sigil banners for every major house in the Seven Kingdoms including the Greyjoys and Targaryens at what was supposed to be a relatively contained, early-season event. He flagged it immediately. "I freaked out and they were pulled before we shot," he wrote, adding, with some self-awareness: "I was an assistant. I had no right to 'freak out.'"

Learning to produce in real time

The first scene from his script to be filmed was the staircase conversation between Ned and Arya Stark. Cogman helped shape it on the day, pulling director Brian Kirk aside with a specific reference. He pointed to the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where Atticus shows Scout his watch and she learns she won't inherit it. The quiet sadness on Mary Badham's face was what he wanted when Arya hears her destiny is to marry a lord and have children, and replies, "That's not me."

"It was my job to get the ball rolling and make sure what we wanted when we wrote it got put on screen," he wrote.

From there, Cogman was on set every day. Benioff and Weiss always worked as a pair, which meant there was always a second unit, sometimes in a different country, that needed a writer-producer present. Cogman became that person by necessity, learning as he went. "I learned to produce in real time," he wrote. "It was my film school."

It was “a Frankenstein monster”

Cogman is honest about what "Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things" actually is, 15 years on: "a Frankenstein monster," in his words. It has more scenes he didn't write than any other episode he was credited for. Benioff and Weiss wrote the Viserys and Daenerys scene, the Alliser Thorne monologue and the Littlefinger speech that gives the Hound's backstory. They could have taken co-writing credit, Cogman says. They didn't.

What he does claim, and takes quiet pride in, is Ned's investigation into Jon Arryn's death and a line he wrote for Daenerys Targaryen: "The last time you have hands." The episode's single greatest moment, he says without hesitation, belongs entirely to George R.R. Martin: Catelyn's inn speech, performed by Michelle Fairley.

"I just typed that speech out in Final Draft," he wrote.

He feels less personal ownership of this episode than he does of later work like "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," "What Is Dead May Never Die," "Kissed by Fire" which were scripts with fewer rewrites and, as he puts it, more of himself in them. But it was still first.

What Games of Thrones game him

Cogman left HBO in 2018 and has since worked as a consulting producer on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He is currently developing a Zorro series for Disney+ as writer, showrunner and executive producer. By his own account, he has had three major shows nearly cross the greenlight line since Game of Thrones ended, none of them made it, for reasons largely beyond his control.

He mentions this not to complain, but to make a point about how rare and fragile the original show's existence actually was. "Game of Thrones was very close to not happening in the early days for multiple reasons," he wrote. "Ultimately, it was a case of the right people being there to do it, the network taking a chance on us and the material, and the world wanting it."

The show gave him his career, his film school, lifelong friendships across the world, and, he notes, all three of his children were born during its production. "I've been chasing it ever since," he wrote.

He closed the thread the only way a Game of Thrones writer could: "Happy Birthday, GoT. What Is Dead May Never Die."

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