Game of Thrones showrunners on the legacy of the show, plus how long it’ll run
If you believe David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the executive producers and showrunners behind Game of Thrones, the show won’t be on the air too much longer. The two of them have been pretty firm about ending the Game of Thrones after seven seasons, although they’ve been known to waffle on that point occasionally. In any case, with Season 5 in the can, they’re heading into the final stretch, and it’s time for them to start looking ahead toward the future. They recently sat down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss what legacy they hope the show will leave after it’s gone.
“It would be nice if people kept watching it,” Weiss said, keeping his hopes nice and reasonable. “It’s something I would love for my kids to be able to appreciate someday – though it might be traumatic for them to see it.”
Weiss also dropped another hint about how lengthy the series will eventually end up being. He said that the goal is to tell “a unified story that’s 70-odd hours long.” It would appear that the line between Seasons 7 and 8 continues to blur. Are we in for a two-part final season, a la Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Sopranos? That does seem to be the popular way to finish prestige dramas these days.
Benioff, meanwhile, revealed himself to be a man of a certain age when he said that the hoped Game of Thrones would take a place in history similar to the one occupied by Fast Times at Ridgemont High. That is, he hopes it launches the careers of its many young actors. Ridgemont High, released in 1982, featured early appearances by, among others, Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker, and Nicolas Cage. Some of them went on to become quite popular, I hear.
“It would be fun if…people are still watching [Thrones] 20 years from now and going, ‘Look, that’s a young Aflie Allen,’ or ‘That’s a young Sophie Turner’ – where so many actors started such great careers,” Benioff said.
Finally, Weiss weighed in on the fact that the show has officially gotten ahead of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, and that unless Martin is FedExing the manuscript of The Winds of Winter to his publisher as we speak, we’re going to get into completely uncharted territory.
I’d like to think the unpredictability of the show relative to the books where sometimes the show cleaves to the books and sometimes it departs from the books creates a kind of separate-if-obviously-very-closely-related universe that can coexist…You can’t dictate people’s reactions but I hope there’s an element of surprise introduced into the show’s narrative that makes it exciting for both people who read the books and people who watch the show and haven’t read the books yet.
We are definitely entering a new era for the show, one where book-reader and show-watcher alike are finally in the same boat, a very fragile boat that routinely flings people overboard when a big wave hits. When Season 6 arrives, we’ll be facing the choppy seas together.
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