I talked to the creative team behind The Americans several times during the construction of that show’s generally acclaimed final season, and even though they’d had an idea of the show’s finale in mind since season two, they still wanted to leave things open just in case a better idea came along that blew their original one out of the water. One show that excelled at this approach was FX’s spy drama The Americans. Thus, the best endings are often ones where the writers have a very vague idea of what will probably happen and work toward that point, while also leaving themselves room to radically change everything until the last possible second. Yet you also have to plan some things, because audiences still want to feel like the destination they’ve reached is inevitable. If you can’t get to that major revelation until the end of season two, well, season one might start to feel a little slow. The storytelling can start to drag because you’re so focused on set, arbitrary signposts you’ve already set for yourself down the road.
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But the opposite is often true, because the more you know about how a story is going to play out in the macro, the more the micro just becomes a series of items checked off a list.
You’d think that having a satisfying ending would require having a rock-solid plan to get to that ending. (You can read a much fuller version of this basic tale in Alan Sepinwall’s The Revolution Was Televised.) Gilligan trusted both his writers’ room and his overall conceit for the show - a meek family man becomes a ruthless drug kingpin - to hold everything together while all involved worked toward finding the best story. But Gilligan found the whole process so arduous that in the show’s following seasons, he mostly plotted things on the fly, even as several later episodes featured flash- forwards to some future timeline when Walter White’s crimes had been found out. I really do love Breaking Bad season two. And Gilligan felt because these hints were being seeded, the writers needed to know what that catastrophe was. Throughout that show’s second season, creator Vince Gilligan and his writers seeded hints in several episodes about a catastrophe that would occur in the season finale.
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One of my favorite stories about the construction of a great TV series has always been about the five-season classic Breaking Bad. TV is a medium where you have to plan everything and nothing simultaneously - no small feat The final season of The Americans was met with critical acclaim. But I would argue it was just as much a function of the show having a planned finale. So what was it about Game of Thrones’ final season that left so many people disappointed? Sure, some of the disappointment was an inevitable function of hype. For a show this big to mostly evaporate is somehow more disappointing than if it had ended in a way that actively infuriated me.
And there are plenty of people like me, who feel the season was conceptually interesting while whiffing several key moments of execution.īut I still think it’s fair to say that the general consensus on Game of Thrones’ final season could be described, charitably, as “disappointing.” And the further we get from the finale, the more I can feel myself detaching from the show in a way that suggests I might not think about it much in the years to come. The season certainly has its defenders, who feel the series wrapped up just about perfectly.
(Season one is in second place, with 91 percent.) On one level, these rankings are a little off - I think all six episodes of Game of Thrones’ eighth and final season, whatever my issues with them, are better than “Unbowed,” which is a bad episode of television!īut on another level, they’re pretty well aligned with Rotten Tomatoes’ critical consensus on the final season, which sits at 58 percent, by far the worst ever. The second episode, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” ranks the highest of the six, with an 8.0, but it’s still behind season five’s “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” IMDB’s lowest-ranked episode of Game of Thrones that’s not in the final season, with a score of 8.1. And what’s the second-lowest-ranked episode of the series on IMDB? That would be the final season’s fourth episode, “The Last of the Starks,” coming in at a 5.6.Īnd if you look a little further, you’ll realize that IMDB users’ lowest-ranked six episodes of the entire series are the six episodes of the final season. Game of Thrones’ series finale, “The Iron Throne,” is the show’s lowest-ranked episode ever on IMDB, with the site’s users grading it a 4.3 out of 10.
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