Still Better Than Anything The Walking Dead Attempted
The later seasons of Game of Thrones weren’t the show it used to be. The writing had gotten faster, looser, more interested in spectacle than in the slow-burn consequence that made the early seasons genuinely great. You felt it in the dialogue, in the way plot points that once would have taken a full season to develop now resolved themselves inside a single episode. But even at its most frantic and fan-service-y, it was still better television than almost anything else on at the time. Which, yes, is partly a condemnation of the competition—The Walking Dead had long since eaten itself alive by then.
The Season 7 trailer had all the expected pieces in their expected positions: Daenerys finally arriving in Westeros after six seasons of continent-hopping, Jon Snow bracing for the White Walker army, Arya somewhere deep in a blood rage. The chess board reshuffled again. The trailer did what Game of Thrones trailers always did—communicated scale, accumulated weight, the sense that years of setup were finally paying out—without actually showing anything you could spoil.
I remember watching it and feeling that specific mix of anticipation and preemptive disappointment the show had trained into me by that point. The dragons would look incredible. The set pieces would be enormous. Whether the writing would hold up the architecture was less certain. As it turned out, the architecture wobbled considerably across Season 7—but there were still moments that reminded me exactly why I’d ever cared this much in the first place. Which might be the most honest thing you can say about a show in decline: it could still, occasionally, reach back and grab you.