In the end, Game of Thrones needed better writers

The failure of the final season of Game of Thrones has its cheerful side. Despite the assumptions of “creative industry” executives, the collapse in advances to novelists, the downsizing of serious journalism, and the web appearing to rule that the monetary value of the written word is precisely nothing, it turns out writers are not interchangeable.

For as long as it had George RR Martin’s novels to follow, the series triumphed. The farther it ran ahead of its creator, the worse it became. Its defenders dismiss hundreds of thousands of disappointed viewers as entitled snowflakes.

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Can’t they see that the seeds of Daenerys’s genocidal character were sown over several seasons? Don’t they accept that the battle scenes were brilliant, and that the sack of King’s Landing brought the war crimes of the medieval world to life? Like teachers giving a reading list, they refer you to old episodes to prove the rightness of their strictures. They reveal nothing more than their ignorance of fiction. It is not right or wrong but true or false, and if a story feels false to a large enough section of the audience, the artistic project collapses.

GoT ought to stand alongside Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings as a great fantasy. (I don’t use the genre term dismissively: these are our myths, which will survive after most literary fiction is forgotten.) Yet how many readers have fallen for and fallen into Tolkien and Rowling’s worlds, only to let out a disbelieving protest in the final pages? “Gollum would never have stumbled with the ring into Mount Doom?” “Voldemort’s death makes no sense.”

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The most obvious effect of losing Martin has been the decline in the dialogue. DB Weiss and David Benioff – who ominously call themselves “show runners” rather than “writers” – haven’t been able to match the cynicism, pathos, wit and pain. No one should have expected it of them. Martin is a great storyteller, and although Weiss and Benioff have strengths their talent does not begin to match his. True, Martin gave them an outline of how he saw the books’ ending. But a plot sketch no more guarantees a well-constructed story than an architect’s plan guarantees a well-built house.

If Martin’s fault was to spend too long developing the story, Weiss and Benioff charge through it as if they have a train to catch. They have not learned that it is better to cut a subplot in its entirety than leave it in half-cooked. One minute Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth are having an affair. The next they are not. They cannot build. The final series turns on the fight against Cersei, but she is barely seen until the massacre at King’s Landing. They cannot get their story to make sense. In one episode, three dragons cannot defeat Cersei’s forces. In the next, one can.

When and if Martin finishes the novels, Game of Thrones may stand alongside Tolkien and Rowling. But the TV series demonstrates there is no substitute for an individual writer’s creative vision. And for that we should applaud it.