Creators of Outlander, The Expanse and more assess the ongoing legacy of Game of Thrones

This past Sunday marked the five-year anniversary of the Game of Thrones series finale, an episode that inspired an online firestorm when it aired on HBO back in 2019. Whatever you think of the show's controversial conclusion, we're still living in the shadow of Game of Thrones. You can see its influence not just in the many fantasy and sci-fi shows that have sprung up in its wake, from The Wheel of Time to The Witcher to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, but in the way TV in general has embraced more complex, longer-form storytelling. A lot of that can be traced back to Game of Thrones.

And you don't have to take my word for it. Polygon has run a fantastic article where it asked bigwigs in the TV industry about the legacy of Game of Thrones, and Foundation creator David S. Goyer openly said that his show wouldn't be possible without the HBO phenomenon. "I think [Game of Thrones] completely changed the landscape of television," Goyer said. "And it completely blew open the barn doors of what was possible — that you could tell a story over eight seasons, that you could tell a story that had 30 or 40 different characters, that it would be novelistic in its approach, that it would be a slow burn. And that’s the kind of show I like, those are the kinds of novels I like; so this adaptation of Foundation would not have been possible had that not happened."

Ronald D. Moore, the creator of shows like Outlander, For All Mankind and Battlestar Galactica, agreed that Game of Thrones expanded the kinds of stories that could be told on TV, and not just in a fantasy show. "I think in terms of story, they definitely said, you can do a really intricate plots with multiple characters, and the audience will follow along. If it’s compelling, the audience will hang in there," Moore said. "I think that gives comfort to those of us — especially those who work in the genre field. When you’re pitching shows, when you’re developing shows, there’s always a lot of skepticism on the part of executives who are saying, Well, but the audience will be confused, or they won’t follow along, and they don’t understand this world, and you need to explain it more. Well, Game of Thrones didn’t really explain a lot. You just kind of had to go with it, and the audience was definitely willing to go with it."

Moore was one of a few people to people the death of Ned Stark in the first season of the show as a turning point for them. Naren Shankar, who served as a showrunner on the sci-fi show The Expanse, still doesn't think that Hollywood has the guts to reproduce that sort of high drama. "I think more than anything — both as a viewer and as a writer, and someone who makes these shows — what Game of Thrones does so well is it blew up these tried and true dramatic concepts, where your protagonist essentially had plot armor; no matter how bad it was, you kind of knew they were going to get out of it, you kind of knew that, you know, good would triumph in the end. All of that kind of stuff that had, I think, just woven itself in the fabric of so many shows, the good guys win. And that was not always the case with Game of Thrones," Shankar said. "I think shows talk about being the next Game of Thrones, but they don’t seem to want to quite embrace that same idea. And that, I think, is what still distinguishes the show. It has a fairly ruthless and remorseless harshness in some ways, but it’s all in the service of staying true to character and narrative reality that very few things really pull off. You’re taken into it with an understandable lens. And so you’re drawn into it gradually, and things expand.

The blessing and curse of Game of Thrones

Speaking of Hollywood wanting to reproduce the success of Game of Thrones but misunderstanding what made the series great in the first place, Moore talked about how Thrones raised the bar to an almost unrealistic expectation when it came to budgets and spectacle. "[U]nfortunately, I think the rest of us have suffered since their budget was so big, and they had so many days to shoot these gigantic — I mean, the Battle of the Bastards, I can’t remember how much money they spent on it, and how many days, but it was like a month or something crazy to spend on that one episode. So, and the rest of us mere mortals can’t come close to that kind of money," he said. "But the audience doesn’t have those distinctions, right? They just go, Well, I think it should look really great. And so there’s an expectation that whatever you’re doing, should look as good and be as big as what they did on that show. So that’s kind of the downside of what they did to the rest of us."

Shankar, too, feared that the shows that followed Game of Thrones may have missed the forest for the trees. "I think television business often seems to take the wrong lessons," he said. "Because the show got so gigantic and so enormous in terms of its spectacle. For a while [there was] just this internalized lesson, Oh, we’ve got to make everything that costs $25 million an episode— do we? We don’t really, because the years of the show where people just kind of went crazy for it were not those years. You’re forced into these things, and people think that’s the answer. So you had all of these shows that were really ridiculous, big, crazy, high-budget things, because people think that’s the way to get people into the season. And it’s like: it really isn’t. The things that people mostly remember about Game of Thronesare — there’s a lot of two-handers in that show. There’s a lot of scenes where people just talk to each other; they’re incredibly riveting and amazing."

You see that "bigger is better" ethos reflected in shows like Amazon's The Rings of Power, which cost an ungodly amount of money to make but which got middling reviews from fans who weren't engrossed in the story. Game of Thrones always led with its character, even as the spectacle became more important in later seasons. "It’s kind of the thing that I love in anything," said American Horror Story: Delicate showrunner Halley Feiffer, "which is these moments between characters that feel both surprising and inevitable somehow, and the ways in which — especially in those first few seasons — these characters kept you on this tightrope between loving and loathing them. In one moment, you’re condemning their actions. And in the next moment, you’re hoping they commit more atrocities, if only to create this incredibly dynamic push pull within you, as it were, the way that it really kept you on your toes morally. That was something that I found incredibly exciting and complicated, and made me as a viewer feel implicated in the carnage in ways that felt very challenging, and almost impossible to recreate."

I think Hollywood is still struggling with the question of how to manufacture a phenomenon on par with Game of Thrones. I'm not sure it can be done, but in trying, we're getting a lot of great shows. Just recently, we've gotten to enjoy series like Shōgun, Fallout, 3 Body Problem and Interview With The Vampire, all of which take cues from Thrones, whether in their embrace of spectacle, their willingness to dig deep into complex characters, or something else. So if the attempt to find "the next Game of Thrones" is a quest, then the real treasure may be the terrific shows we got to watch along the way.

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