The Last Kingdom is absolutely fantastic, but it is NOT better than Game of Thrones

Recently, Unilad published an article about how some fans of the Netflix historical fiction show The Last Kingdom thought it was a better show than HBO's Game of Thrones, and indeed may be one of the best shows ever. They are wrong, but not as severely as one might think.

Let's set the record straight right now: This is not a dissertation about how The Last Kingdom isn't a great television show. It's a fantastic, swashbuckling, raucous rampage through an interesting time period in British history seldom presented in a digestible way. I love The Last Kingdom and I have watched it three times. I have read The Saxon Stories books by Bernard Cornwell multiple times too, and there is the luxury as a reader knowing the book series is finished. That is a big plus in its favor.

The Last Kingdom has so many things to love about it: a lovable, intrepid hero in Uhtred, numerous strong secondary characters like Finan, Brida, Beocca, and Hild, just to name a few. It was also based on real history. It covered the events surrounding the unification of Britain in the 9th and 10 centuries through the eyes of the fictional Uhtred.

The reasons for The Last Kingdom's greatness and everlasting entertainment value lies in how incredible Alexander Dreymon was as Uhtred and how good Bernard Cornwell's source material is.

In what ways is Game of Thrones better than The Last Kingdom?

As good as The Last Kingdom is, the storyline is fairly linear. Through all of the seasons and subsequent movie, Seven Kings Must Die, the whole point of the show was to tell the story of how the Saxons were able to unify and fight off the invading Danes. This is something the Britons were unable to do four centuries earlier when it was the Saxons who were the invaders.

While the journey through each season was different, it was kind of the same thing season after season. Uhtred had to foil this Danish villain or that Danish villain, each seemingly more terrible than the last.

Many will point to the ending of Game of Thrones, which we can all admit wasn't great, but The Last Kingdom kind of ruined its ending as well, this time by jamming two books worth of content into a two-hour movie that did a terrible job of clarifying the timeline for the audience.

While The Last Kingdom was fairly straightforward in what was going on, Game of Thrones was anything but. It was full of twists and turns, intrigue and deceit, love and treachery. Instead of having one clear main character, Game of Thrones had several lead characters to love or hate, depending on which one was featured that episode. If you love villains, no show has ever had more utterly fantastic villains than Game of Thrones.

Tyrion is as great a character as Uhtred, in his own way. Who wasn't pulling for Arya? What about Jon Snow and Sansa Stark? And Daenerys Targaryen (until the very end)? For every horrible villain in The Last Kingdom, there were three in Game of Thrones.

The Last Kingdom was also was much smaller on a production scale. While there were castles and fortresses, they were scaled down to suit the stark historical times. Many outdoor scenes were film in various locations around the U.K. countryside.

Game of Thrones was a grand production, shot across many locations and countries with elaborate sets and CGI enhancements. There are some people that probably prefer the stripped down production and unsophisticated storylines of The Last Kingdom, and there is nothing wrong with that.

In a nutshell, Game of Thrones is just more. More production, more characters to love and to hate, more plots and plot twists, and, of course, more dragons.

George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire book series, although uncompleted, is beyond compare in the fantasy genre. When he bothers to write, his prose is as good as it gets. This is not a knock on Cornwell (not a fantasy writer, but a historical novelists) by any means. I personally own and have read more than 40 books by him, and he is one of my favorite authors. The best thing about him is he is a writer who actually writes, unlike Martin, who has been working on The Winds of Winter, the next book in his saga, for well over a decade.

Who knows how the ending of Game of Thrones would have gone if Martin had completed the last two books of the series sometime within those nine years the show was on? I didn't hate the last season as much as some, though I wasn't thrilled about the last couple of episodes. They were still better than the movie that ended The Last Kingdom.

Game of Thrones changed television forever. Without it, we might not even have The Last Kingdom. There is one thing that is an absolute certainly, though: you can love both. They are both spectacular and terrific entertainment. They both have characters to love and hate. Just because Game of Thrones is the (slightly) better show, on almost every level or criteria, it doesn't mean you can't love Uhtred and The Last Kingdom and enjoy every glorious moment of it.

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