Years of Blood

When HBO locked in seasons five and six of Game of Thrones, I felt something I don’t often feel about television: certainty that the thing I cared about would keep being made. The show had been genuinely great up to that point. It had taken George R.R. Martin’s books and somehow improved certain elements while preserving the whole architecture of violence and desire and political chaos that made them worth reading.

The announcement wasn’t surprising—the show’s success made more seasons inevitable—but it was reassuring. I could believe that the people running it understood what worked, that they wouldn’t let it become the standard television story, predictable and safe. More seasons meant more time to watch these people make terrible choices and pay for them.

I couldn’t have known then that the later seasons would hollow out. That the infrastructure that had felt so solid would collapse under the weight of its own complexity, that the writers would eventually run out of the material that had made them good. All I knew at the moment of the announcement was that the show had a future, and that future felt like it would be worth watching.

It’s strange how these certainties work. You feel them in the moment and they’re completely real, and then something shifts and you realize they were always fragile. Game of Thrones didn’t fail all at once; it just gradually became less of what made it work. But none of that had happened yet. At the moment HBO made the announcement, all I could feel was relief that the story would keep going.