At first this article reads like your typical anti-piracy screed. It rants about how 10x more people watched GoT illegally (confusing them with lost sales) and ends with how downloading movies can get your credit card stolen.
The middle of the article however, destroys the author’s case.
Time Warner (owning company of HBO) CEO Alan Bewkes stated in 2013 how becoming the most illegally streamed show in history was “better than an Emmy” and that torrenting ultimately led to more paid subscriptions.
“We’ve been dealing with this for 20, 30 years—people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world and that’s better than an Emmy.”
The CEO of Time Warner, who knows more about the finances of his own show than ForeverGeek writer Tom Llewellyn, championed piracy and said that it brought them more subscribers rather than nearly destroying the show as the article claims.
Needless to say, Tom forwent a rebuttal in favor of writing how you can get malware from downloading it…
Anti-Piracy Propaganda: 0 Truth: 1
Good thing they were fast enough to destroy it with the shittiest last season ever.
See, I think that was the plan all along, to totally own all the losers that pirated GoT, by totally spoiling the show for everyone.
Let’s be real. HBO wanted to hold on to their cash cow for as long as possible, but D&D just shat all over the last season to get that sweet Star Wars cash.
Nobody was on-board with anything in that last season except D&D, who just wanted to finish it off as fast as possible. Not even the actors.
The hilarious thing is how their own bungling of the last season cost them the Star Wars gig. Maybe if they’d actually put in some effort instead of half assing it, they’d have gotten the job. But then again, the show was on a downward spiral since the end of Season 4, and Dumb and Dumber’s only talent was adapting the books really well (and even then, they still fudged details), so I suppose this was bound to happen.
Honestly, I want more Hollywood writers who are good at adapting books, instead of hating the source material and doing a terrible job winging it.
I can’t count the number of TV shows ruined by Hollywood writers usurping the universes from multi-million dollar and very successful source material, just to create their own shitty version themselves. In fact, it’s much easier to adapt source material, so I don’t even understand why they don’t do it out of pure laziness. If they could just drop their fucking egos for a bit, they could be as famous as D&D.
Didn’t the actor who played Tyrion Lannister stand by the ending? I remember him being salty about criticisms of it. Though to be fair it must really suck to have your breakthrough role go up in flames like that. I wouldn’t want to admit it either. Now I can’t even remember the dude’s name. He was supposed to be a beacon of hope for dwarf actors who wanted serious roles, and the role became a joke.
Maybe that, yeah, but I also remember certain interviews of him being just as passively critical about the last season as Emile Clarke was at the time. As in, he couldn’t really say anything damaging (contractually), but you could tell by the reactions.
As far as dwarf actors, he really did break out into serious roles in various movies, especially in spots where his dwarfism wasn’t a highlight. But, I think Hollywood just treated him as an exception, instead of changing the framing of how they cast actors, which is extremely disappointing.
GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?
That they threw away all the rules they established before like traveling now took 0 hours and soon. All of this because the last book wasn’t written yet so they had to write some story themselves and failed miserably.
I read an essay where the author argued that in the first few seasons, the GRR Martin material, World events happened and the characters were forced to adapt and react.
Once the television writers took over, the dynamic flipped so characters’ actions forced the World itself to change and react, which is apparently how most television writing works since television writing revolves mostly around characters.
That’s a pretty inelegant way to explain it, sorry, but I think the idea feels pretty accurate to me. There is a definite point where you can tell when the staff writers have to start plotting for themselves.
You could build a museum of horrible decisions and fill it with the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. Whether you watched it or not, the show was a cultural touchstone, and the ending retroactively ruined everything that came before. Many shows have started well and ended poorly, but I’d argue that GoT was on pace to be an all-time top ten series, and there was absolutely nothing good to say about how it ended. Bad writing, bad acting, bad production values, sloppy editing, poor visual design, it was both rushed and too slow, and nothing made sense. If you paid someone to deliberately fuck up everything about the show, they would not have been as effective at it because it would have been obvious.
Compare it to this… Watching a highly rated chef come up with the most amazing sounding and looking dinner meal over the course of a few hours. You are anxiously awaiting to take a bite and salivating for that moment. When you finally get served your plate and get to that scrumptious first bite, the biggest wave of disappointment hits and you lose your appetite.
I don’t know how else to explain it
The dish comes out and it’s Spam topped with Kraft singles.