[colmvp]

> Do Finales Define a Show?

It's mind-boggling how much Benioff and Weiss dropped the ball on the final two seasons of GOT. It's hard for me to even re-watch clips of the early seasons on YouTube because of how much I know its going to take a turn for the worst. The sad part is the production value and actors were still on their A game.

In contrast, I can rewatch practically anything from BB or BCS.

[rags2riches]

Please save the acronyms for repeated uses of a long name. It helps the rest if us to understand what the hell you're talking about.

[gordon_freeman]

BB = Breaking Bad, BCS = Better Call Saul

[voisin]

100x this. I am used to reading the traditional “write it in full once with a definition” for further use, eg. Breaking Bad (“BB”), but find lots of people on Hacker News just assume that everyone knows the acronym and several times a week find I have to search for a definition. It impedes understanding for what?

[mvdtnz]

Hacker Newsers do this on purpose. Many believe that the fewer people that understand what they're saying, the smarter they will look.

[selcuka]

> Hacker Newsers do this on purpose.

Did you mean HNers?

[jader201]

Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.

[throwbadubadu]

Often don't.

[voisin]

Assume incompetence before malice.

[Sebb767]

I feel the same way about Game of Thrones. I really loved the first few seasons, but I can't bring myself to start rewatching them as I know where it inevitably goes.

It's even worse than How I Met Your Mother in my opinion, for two reasons - first , GoT is much more focused on a long running story, making the conclusion more important. But more importantly, HIMYM is a sharp decline; you can simply skip the last two episodes and have a perfectly fine ending. GOT just declines ever more, making it hard to set a point at which to end the show.

[Log_out_]

A rewriting AI made better ending for that series is my personal generative AI milestone.

[ofcourseyoudo]

They took many of the elements that made the first seasons so good and completely reversed course on them. Two that stand out are 1) anyone can die at any time and 2) these characters are really far apart geographically and it takes time for them to get anywhere, and things will happen to them along the way.

The last two seasons suddenly all of the main cast had plot armor and could teleport anywhere they wanted.

[ajdude]

> The sad part is the production value and actors were still on their A game.

The actors, perhaps. But I recall at least one mixup where a Starbucks cup was accidentally left in a scene and filmed in one of the later Seasons

[BLKNSLVR]

> It's mind-boggling how much Benioff and Weiss dropped the ball

Watching it, at times, I remember getting the visceral feeling that those who were the driving force behind the greatness of what the show was, had just lost interest; had new projects in mind and were just phoning it in for GoT, in the end.

[shiroiuma]

Maybe they just ran out of ideas? These two didn't even write the original stories; the author George RR Martin did, but he didn't finish the story before they got to season 7 or 8, so they made up all the last stuff themselves without him.

Even if they had written the screenplays themselves, that's no guarantee of future quality. I can think of two cases with movies where the same people made horrible sequels: the original "Highlander" was great, for example, but the same director (and story writer) did the sequel and it was horrible. Similarly, "The Matrix" was revolutionary, but the same two brothers who wrote the story and directed did the sequels, and they weren't that great (though arguably not the huge drop in quality between Highlander 1 and 2).

[mingus88]

The quality of Game of Thrones directly maps to how much source material they had to adapt.

The show runners have taken all the heat, but the fact is GRRM knew he needed to wrap up the novels before the show caught up. He wrote many blog posts about it. Unfortunately, it’s clear now that he never will.

Expecting the show runners to finish a series that even the original author can’t is just unreasonable. To that point they had writing credits on The Wolverine and a couple other shows.

But according to popular internet sentiment, Benoif and Weiss are to blame, not HBO or GRRM for leaving them high and dry…

[thinkingemote]

It highlights what a good screenwriter Martin is. He writes for the screen in his novels (and this is good) so much so that it doesn't engage with my imagination at all which is actually what you need for television!

Obviously he has a good imagination and it's this that the other writers couldn't replicate. Maybe the imaginary is harder to capture in a screenplay compared to literature. Fascinating topic.

[peddling-brink]

I just finished watching it for the first time. Start to finish.

I didn’t hate the ending. Season 5 was the worst, and the whole, “I’m going west of Westeros because that’s where the maps stop” was some weird nonsense, but otherwise it fit the general theme of the show.