IWAN RHEON: I got the call, and Dan and David joked, “Isn’t it great Ramsay ends up on the Iron Throne?” I said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?” It was right he went down, because where else could he go? It’s justified. And Jon Snow needed to win because otherwise there was no hope left in the world. But it is interesting because it isn’t fair—without the Knights of the Vale, it would have been over [for Jon Snow and his army]. Then Ramsay still thought he’d won. He was so arrogant and self-assured he thought he’d still be fine, until the last.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: It wasn’t fun for Iwan. He spent the night tied to a chair, covered in sticky fake blood and surrounded by dogs that were really quite scary in real life. We also didn’t know whether it was his last day on set or not, which was disconcerting for him too after so many years.
DAVE HILL: Dogs are hard to make vicious. And because of health and safety we could never have Iwan in the cage with the dogs when they attack. But it all cut together beautifully.
Originally the scene was meant to be even more gruesome, showing Ramsay’s flesh being ripped off his face, Variety reported.
IWAN RHEON: I feel really lucky he got a proper send-off. It’s a gruesome death, and it’s so ironic as he’s been banging on about those hounds. And it leaves Sansa in an interesting place as a character. He’s saying, “I’m inside you.” [Rheon shudders.] It’s horrible, but he probably has done some damage. He’s got in her head, and he’s probably broken her in some way.
SOPHIE TURNER: He just gets under her skin, and that he violated her in such a terrible way, she can never get that part of her back again. He’s imprinted in her mentally and physically.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: I must admit I kind of wanted to make people start to feel for Ramsay [during his death scene] in that wonderful way Thrones turns these things on their head. But David and Dan were clear: They didn’t want anyone to sympathize with Ramsay Bolton. In a way I agree; that was not a time to be morally ambiguous. Ramsay needed to die, and horribly. That was what the audience had been waiting to see.
The most effective moment for me was the sound of a squealing pig you hear from Ramsay in the background as Sansa walked away. Apparently that’s what happens when you rip someone’s windpipe open while they’re still alive and gasping for air.
There’s also the moment where she turns to leave, stops, and leans back in, lingering a moment longer. That’s my favorite shot of my episodes that year.
DAVE HILL: That smile Sophie gave as she walked away was all her. That wasn’t in the script. We saw it in one of her takes, and David and Dan were like, “Oh, that’s great. . . .”
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: “The Battle of the Bastards” was all about the journey back to life at the eleventh hour, rediscovering the desire to live. Looking back, it seemed like an insurmountable task . . . then season eight happened.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
All Shows Must Die
When is the right time to end a story?
For TV networks, the answer is usually simple: A show ends when it is no longer sufficiently profitable. Networks run a show until its ratings sink below what a new series would likely deliver. The quality of a program’s content is often irrelevant so long as it isn’t controversial and its Nielsen ratings stay above a certain number—critics could slam CBS’s Two and a Half Men all day, so long as it kept delivering fifteen million viewers a week. When a show slips below the red line, it’s abruptly yanked off the air or quietly shut down between seasons. Producers and cast are fired the same as any other corporate employees—no advance warning, no poignant goodbyes, you’re done.
That’s how TV shows end. Usually. There were always exceptions. Megahits with hefty cultural influence, such as M*A*S*H, Cheers, Hill Street Blues, Friends, and Seinfeld, had such massive ratings and acclaim that their producers were granted time to craft a legit finale. But even those endings typically consisted of one or two conclusive-feeling episodes tacked on to an otherwise regular season.
Things began to change with the rise of heavily serialized dramas in the early 2000s. Shows like Lost, The Shield, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and The Sopranos demanded producers plan in advance not just episodes but entire seasons—better yet, multiple seasons—with tightly woven narratives and a fleshed-out final arc. When one of these kinds of shows was prematurely canceled and its fans were denied closure (like with NBC’s Hannibal, ABC’s Lois and Clark, and TNT’s Southland), they would justifiably howl.
Well-planned endings for serialized TV shows also started to make financial sense due to a growing after-market on home video, and, later, on streaming services. The previous TV afterlife of programs’ retiring to daytime syndication, where episodes were watched casually and sporadically, was being replaced by fans’ bingeing a show from start to finish, and perhaps even buying a copy of the show to own. And if a studio is selling “the complete series” of a title on Blu-ray or on Amazon Prime, the show had better feel, well, complete. In the on-demand age, networks and producers grappled with a new problem: When is the right time to end a story . . . creatively?
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Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2011: On the season-two set, the Game of Thrones showrunners were asked: “How long is Game of Thrones?”
“We went into this with the potentially overambitious notion that to get to the end, we would have seventy or eighty or however many hours,” showrunner Dan Weiss said.
Weiss called this idea “overambitious” because when Thrones debuted, seven seasons was considered a very long and successful run for a cable TV drama. As David Benioff said a couple of years later: “To start on a show and say your goal is seven seasons is the height of lunacy.”
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Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2012: The showrunners had given more thought to Thrones’ ideal length. The biggest problem, they figured, was the battles, particularly the climactic spectacle Martin had envisioned for the final season. They didn’t see any way they could possibly pull off a proper ending for A Song of Ice and Fire on a TV budget. So when asked, “How long is Game of Thrones?” the producers once again said around seventy hours, but with a twist.
“The worlds get so big, the battles get so massive. In our dream, we do three seasons after this one and then [Thrones] movies,” showrunner David Benioff said.
Weiss added: “It’s what we’re working toward in a perfect world. If everything works, we end up in the best of both worlds—epic fantasy story but the level of investment in those characters that is impossible in a movie.”
HBO shot down that plan rather quickly (as in, literally within hours of our conversation after I asked the network for a comment). Programming chief Michael Lombardo said he told the producers, “Guys, I have to remind you, that’s not our business.” HBO’s model is to serve its subscribers, not to tell paying customers to go to a movie theater to see how the network’s own show wraps up. So Benioff and Weiss went back to their far more difficult Plan B—make Thrones so popular that HBO would feel obligated to bankroll a big-budget final season. As actor Harry Lloyd (Viserys Targaryen) put it: “Game of Thrones had to become the biggest fucking TV show in the world so they could make it.”
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Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2013: On the set of season four, the producers were asked the question once again.
“Seven seasons is the plan,” Benioff affirmed. “Season four is right down the middle, the pivot point. Seven gods, seven kingdoms, seven seasons—it feels right to us.”
If the producers’ replies to this question are starting to feel repetitive, that’s the point. Many have speculated Thrones concluded with season eight at the height of its popularity because the show’s writers wanted to move on to lucrative new opportunities or had grown exhausted by the production’s labor-intensive demands. But Benioff and Weiss always envisioned Thrones as lasting roughly seventy hours (which it ultimately did, nearly ex
actly). “That people would give credence to the idea that they rushed it because they wanted to go off and do another show just makes you realize how little people understand the level of commitment this show had for everybody,” producer Christopher Newman said.
Which isn’t to say other factors didn’t weigh into the showrunners’ decision. Here’s one that likely did: Fox’s The X-Files was derided for airing too many seasons, running an increasingly incoherent mythology into the ground. ABC’s Lost had introduced so many compelling mysteries that it became impossible for any final season to tie them all together satisfactorily. Battlestar Galactica had an impressive run out of the gate, then creatively stumbled in its latter half. As of this writing, AMC’s The Walking Dead—for years, the only series to beat Thrones among young viewers in the United States—is staggering into a tenth season long after most of its original cast (and its audience) has left.
But then there was Breaking Bad. Benioff and Weiss revered the AMC crime drama. Breaking Bad concluded in 2013 after only sixty-two episodes with a final arc that was praised by critics and fans alike. Even Breaking Bad’s endgame, however, wasn’t entirely a creative decision.
It’s difficult to imagine now, but Breaking Bad was not a ratings success its first four years. Critics loved the show, and that was worth something, but episodes averaged fewer than two million viewers. The show’s future was once so much in doubt that creator Vince Gilligan wrote his season-four finale to potentially serve as a series ender. After it aired, AMC wanted to wrap up Breaking Bad with a shortened fifth-and-final season, while studio Sony lobbied for two more seasons. Their protracted negotiation went down to the wire, and a compromise was struck in 2011. Breaking Bad would conclude with sixteen episodes for season five that would be aired across two years. “As Vince would say, you don’t want to be the last person at the party,” star Aaron Paul said at the time.
Then something happened that nobody expected. With Breaking Bad’s old episodes addicting new viewers on Netflix, the ratings for its final season on AMC surged from two million viewers to ten million, stunning the television industry (and, especially, AMC).
It’s fair to say that if Breaking Bad had delivered those kinds of numbers before its final-season negotiations, even Saul Goodman couldn’t have convinced AMC to end the show.
For the makers of Game of Thrones, how these other acclaimed serialized genre dramas had ended—as well as their experiment with adding the Dorne storyline—all seemed to point to the same conclusion: The big trap was trying to tell too much story and being forced to stay on the air too long. Weiss often quoted a line from writer David Mamet: “Doing a movie or a play is like running a marathon. Doing a television show is like running until you die.” The showrunners didn’t want to die, or to inadvertently kill their show. “Would I have watched another two seasons of Breaking Bad? Of course,” Weiss told Vanity Fair. “The fact that I would easily have watched much, much more than I got made the ending so much more poignant and stronger and better for me.”
Having Thrones run for nine or ten seasons looked to Benioff and Weiss like an obvious mistake when they could instead ramp up the spectacle and finish strong.
After all, nobody had ever accused a hit drama series of intentionally ending too soon.
DAVID BENIOFF: We didn’t want to become a show that outstayed its welcome. Part of what we love about these books, and the show, is this sense of momentum and building toward something. If we tried to turn it into a ten-season show, we’d strangle the golden goose. We wanted to stop when the people working on it and watching it wish we had [kept going] a little bit longer. There’s the old adage of “Always leave them wanting more,” but also when you stop wanting to be there—that’s when things fall apart.
BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): There are White Walkers and dragons, and once they come together the story has to go where it goes. There’s probably a world where we could have milked this thing for another eight seasons, and that would have been very lucrative for all of us, but at a certain point the guys just really wanted to go out on a good high place. The characters are all meeting for a reason, and that’s because shit’s going down, and so the shit has to go down.
There was yet another potential concern as well. It was becoming difficult (and expensive) for Thrones to hold the show’s cast together as other Hollywood studios eagerly sought to grab its stars for their tentpole films. The production always tried to accommodate cast members when they wanted to make something else—Emilia Clarke and Gwendoline Christie had appeared in Star Wars movies, and Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams, and Peter Dinklage were cast in X-Men films. (“Are they still making those?” Dinklage wryly asked Turner on the Thrones set when she told him that she was going to play Jean Grey.) But making Thrones still took up the bulk of the year for the core cast, eliminating their ability to accept many other opportunities. And ever since Clarke had had her brain surgery and Harington had shattered his ankle, the showrunners had been aware that the odds of successfully keeping such a large and popular cast together until the very end of the series were slim. They counted themselves fortunate to have come so far with so many intact. Every additional season, and every cast contract renewal, meant betting on another roll of a couple dozen dice.
Benioff and Weiss deciding to end Thrones was not a conclusion made lightly, however, and it came with a significant degree of mournfulness. One night around four A.M. during the filming of season six in the Spanish desert, the showrunners sat in a tent and discussed their feelings about wrapping things up. They were waiting for their crew to finish prepping the village of Vaes Dothrak for the scene where Daenerys burns it down. With no immediate duties, they opened a bottle of bourbon and grew introspective.
DAVID BENIOFF: You end up spending a shitload of time away from your family and friends. Well, I don’t have any friends left. Theoretically, if I had friends left. You instead spend time with your colleagues, and I’m truly fond of all of them. If you’re going to spend years working on one show, you better really love the people. And we love the show too, which isn’t always the case. You always work hard on things, even stuff that turns out poorly, and you always put everything you got into it. To spend time on a show that people respond to all over the world is incredibly gratifying. You don’t want to fuck it up and you’re scared about whatever comes next, because it’s 99 percent likely to be anticlimactic after Game of Thrones.
DAN WEISS: I just think about how bizarre it will be to not be doing this anymore, because it becomes the water you swim in. It becomes every minute of every day, 365 days a year, this show is on your mind or in your life. After it’s done, it will be like reentering some weird universe where I don’t even know how people act there anymore.
DAVID BENIOFF: Even on a basic level, I’m sitting here in a tent in the desert, and if I want a chocolate bar, somebody will get you a chocolate bar. That’s not normal. And just on a writing level I’ll think, “It would be fun if Tyrion makes a joke about that, maybe not this season but maybe next season. . . .” You have characters you love and you’re immersed in the stories and you can come up with ideas for them, and a few months later, these incredible actors will be saying those things. That’s such a rare gift for a screenwriter.
DAN WEISS: If ten years ago somebody had given me a chance to write a ticket, I wouldn’t have been crazy enough to write a ticket to something this great. When I’m seventy-five years old, I’m going to be saying [affecting a quivering, elderly voice], “You know, it would be great if Tyrion said . . . Ah, goddamn it!”
And making Game of Thrones wasn’t just creatively and financially fulfilling, it was occasionally incredibly fun. There were times when their work ended and the partying began.
DAVID BENIOFF: The cast and crew love to party. It was a hard-drinking, hard-partying group, and we had some really great times.
The show’s end-of-season wrap parties held at Dubrovnik’s EastWest Beach Club we
re as epic as anything on the screen. A crew member once passed out naked locked out of their hotel and then had to walk to the front desk to ask for a key. (“Do you have ID?” the clerk asked.) Another woke up, also naked, at the top of a Croatia hotel’s water slide and found himself being kicked in the ribs by an annoyed eight-year-old.
Still, by season five, Benioff and Weiss had a plan to end their show. But convincing themselves was one thing; convincing HBO was another entirely. It was pretty ironic. Thrones had to become the biggest show in the world in order to secure a budget that could pull off its cinematic storytelling and epic battles. Yet its success also created tens of millions of fans who didn’t want the story to end and a network that didn’t want to risk losing licensing revenue and subscribers. Thrones wasn’t just a TV show; it was a network’s most lucrative product, one that parent company Time Warner heralded in its quarterly Wall Street conference calls (by one estimate, Thrones had generated more than a billion dollars of revenue for HBO). The writers were at risk of being trapped by their own success.
One bit of leverage in the showrunners’ corner was HBO’s brand within the television industry. The network had painstakingly cultivated a reputation as an island of creative freedom where top filmmakers were trusted to call their own shots. Still, it’s difficult to dream of a hypothetical scenario that would put HBO’s creator-friendliness to a tougher test than this one. Would HBO really cut off the largest revenue stream it’d ever had because a couple of writers said they wanted to quit telling a story about fire-breathing dragons and supersized wolves?
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