HBO Exec Addresses Fan Backlash to Game of Thrones Series Finale

For the better part of a decade, Game of Thrones has been one of the most popular shows on television, sparking countless fan theories that attempted to predict how the final season would unfold. The drawback to the fantasy series earning so many fans is that there were that many more expectations that the show needed to fulfill, leading to the series finale ultimately disappointing viewers whose hopes for the narrative's outcome went unfulfilled. Despite fans being vocal about their disappointments, programming president Casey Bloys recently detailed just how impossible a task it would have been to fulfill the wishes of all fans.

"There's no way for [co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] to have landed this plane in a way that would have made everybody happy and they're not out to make everybody happy," Bloys shared with The Hollywood Reporter. "I think they did a beautiful job. You just have to accept that not everybody is going to agree with the choices. I'm paraphrasing Tim but basically for show this big, and this epic and this sprawling, they [Benioff and Weiss] have to make choices."

Like all great art, the main goal is to inspire a reaction in those who witness it, with any reaction being more important than caring so little that it inspires no reaction in the viewer.

"What's great about the show is it made people feel a lot of things — positive and negative," Bloys noted. "A lot of people had invested in characters and hoped for certain things and wanted to see certain twists. There's probably a little bit of mourning going on that the show is over. I get it, I understand it: it's a big show and people really invested a lot in it — and that says a lot about what the show did. People really cared about it."

One of the prevailing criticisms about the final season of the series is that, regardless of the narrative's various reveals, the abbreviated episode count made important twists feel more jarring.

"The guys have known what they've wanted to do for a long, long time," the HBO executive noted. "They've had a plan in their mind. I've been on the record saying I'd take five more seasons. But they've had a plan that they wanted to do and this made sense to them. They made this decision a long time ago and they're doing it exactly how they planned to do it."

He added, "I'm not aware of any conversations that anybody thought it was crammed or anything like that."

Bloys also confirmed that, while there are multiple Game of Thrones spinoffs in the works, none of them would serve as a sequel to this series or focus on the continued adventures of characters from the show.

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