Producers: “The Show’s End Could Deviate From The Books”

With the fact that the show will end before the books now all but assured, producers Benioff and Weiss face several problems. For a long time they held firm on seven seasons, and even though they’ve wavered enough that it could be eight, they’re not willing to stretch things much farther than that. They’ve admitted that they’ve had to make changes along the way in order to streamline the show into a manageable format. And they’re stayed true to the books as much as they were able. They’ve done it for Season 5 as best they could. According to Benioff: “The very first scene of the season and the very last scene of the season are book scenes.” 

But there’s one wild card they can’t solve, and they’re just living with that. That’s George RR Martin’s writing process. Martin recently admitted that he just thought of a twist for a character in his books, but it’s an avenue the show has already closed on the screen. That doesn’t mean he won’t take it, and that doesn’t mean he won’t think up half a dozen other such twists between now and the time A Dream of Spring is published.

As Benioff admitted to Variety in this week’s issue:

We’ve had a lot of conversations with George, and he makes a lot of stuff up as he’s writing it. Even while we talk to him about the ending, it doesn’t mean that that ending that he has currently conceived is going to be the ending when he eventually writes it.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Martin stopped writing right after the fifth book was published in 2011 to do promotions and stuff, a move he now views as a mistake. That means the ending the show is aiming for has been frozen in amber for a while. But with Martin buckling down to the point where he’s threatening to cancel appearances in order to finish The Winds of Winter, those juices are thawing, and the ending is far more fluid than it once was. As Dan Weiss put it:

It’s like looking at a landscape and saying, “OK, there’s a mountain over there, and I know that I’m getting to that mountain.” There’s an event that’s going to happen, and I know that I’m moving in the general direction of that event, but what’s between where I’m standing now and that thing off on the horizon, I’m not totally sure. I’ll know when I get there, and then I’ll see what the terrain looks like around me and I’ll choose my path once I get closer to it. He figures a lot of this stuff as he goes. He always says he’s a gardener, not an architect.

As for how long the show will go on for, Benioff and Weiss both admit, once again, that HBO would love it to run ten seasons: “We could go another four years — and we could come up with good stories.” But the whole point of the pitch from the very beginning was this is a story with a beginning, middle and end. There was no renewal announcement this year, since Season 6 was already greenlit last year along with Season 5. The question is, whenever the renewal announcement for Season 7 comes, will it come with an announcement that this is it? Or will they at least stretch to Season 8, teasing Martin–as he has teased so many of his readers–that finishing the books and the show at the same time is still possible?

• Published on 04/16/2015 at 8:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT