TV Series
Game of Thrones is an American fantasy drama television series created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss for HBO. It is the first adaptation of the A Song of Ice and Fire franchise, a series of high fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, the first of which is A Game of Thrones. The show premiered on HBO in the United States on April 17, 2011, and concluded on May 19, 2019, with 73 episodes broadcast over eight…
↗ Wikipedia73 episodes · 8 seasons · Ended
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The Dragon and the Wolf (S7x07) Airdate: 27 August 2017 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Jeremy Podeswa Running Time: 80 minutes As *Game of Thrones* barrelled towards its conclusion, its scale became its defining, and ultimately suffocating, characteristic. The final episodes of its penultimate seasons were cultural events, shattering viewership records with each outing. This expansion was mirro…More
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Beyond the Wall (S7x06) Airdate: 20 August 2017 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Alan Taylor Running Time: 71 minutes By the seventh season of *Game of Thrones*, the grand, intricate tapestry of George R. R. Martin’s world had been radically simplified for a broader, arguably attention-deficient television audience. The showrunners, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, exhibited clear signs of creative…More
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Eastwatch (S7x05) Airdate: 13 August 2017 Written by: Dave Hill Directed by: Matt Shakman Running Time: 58 minutes For much of its runtime, *Game of Thrones* has positioned itself as the brand of fantasy not merely different from, but often the deliberate antithesis of, the paradigms established by J.R.R. Tolkien. Where Tolkien’s epic is fundamentally about the struggle between unambiguous good and a corrupting evil…More
The Spoils of War (S7x04) Airdate: 6 August 2017 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Matt Shakman Running Time: 50 minutes By the time *Game of Thrones* reached its penultimate season, the narrative machinery had undergone a profound and irreversible shift. The decision by showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to condense the final two acts into a mere thirteen episodes—a drastic reduction from t…More
The Queen’s Justice (S7x03) Airdate: 30 July 2017 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Mark Mylod Running Time: 63 minutes The penultimate season of *Game of Thrones* often gave the unmistakable impression of being the final season of the series. This was a direct consequence of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss demonstrating a pronounced tendency to seek quick and simple solutions to the prof…More
Stormborn (S7x02) Airdate: 23 July 2017 Written by: Bryan Cogman Directed by: Mark Mylod Running Time: 58 minutes The final two seasons of *Game of Thrones* presented the creative team with a profound and perhaps insurmountable narrative problem: how to maintain genuine suspense and dramatic interest when the ultimate outcome of the central conflict appeared all but preordained. By the start of Season 7, the “game o…More
Dragonstone (S7x01) Airdate: 16 July 2017 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Jeremy Podeswa Running Time: 59 minutes The most significant and telling conflict in the latter years of *Game of Thrones* was actually fought in the boardrooms and writers’ rooms of Hollywood. It centred on a single, fundamental question: when should the saga end? HBO, understandably protective of its most lucrative cultu…More
The Winds of Winter (S6x10) Airdate: 26 June 2016 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Miguel Sapochnik Running Time: 68 minutes The world of George R.R. Martin’s *A Song of Ice and Fire* is so elaborately constructed, its political and mystical plots so densely interwoven, that the process of simplifying its narrative for a television audience became the central, Herculean challenge of *Game of Thro…More
Battle of the Bastards (S6x09) Airdate: 19 June 2016 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Miguel Sapochnik Running Time: 60 minutes From its inception, *Game of Thrones* demonstrated that its creators possessed a formidable understanding of how to captivate an audience through a variety of means—political intrigue, shocking betrayals, and visceral drama. Yet, none of these methods proved as consisten…More
No One (S6x08) Airdate: 12 June 2016 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Mark Mylod Running Time: 50 minutes *Game of Thrones*’ hold on global popular culture in the mid-2010s was demonstrated in myriad ways. One of its more spectacular, and perhaps unexpected, legacies was its ability to seed the internet’s vernacular, transforming specific lines of dialogue into ubiquitous memes and phrases. *No O…More
The Broken Man (S6x07) Airdate: 5 June 2016 Written by: Bryan Cogman Directed by: Mark Mylod Running Time: 50 minutes By the sixth season of *Game of Thrones*, the tell-tale signs of creative fatigue were becoming difficult to ignore. The most glaring structural symptom was the decision, from Season 7 onward, to truncate the episode count, abandoning the established ten-episode format that had defined the series’ sp…More
Blood of My Blood (S6x06) Airdate: 29 May 2016 Written by: Bryan Cogman Directed by: Jack Bender Running Time: 51 minutes By the sixth season of *Game of Thrones*, the widening chasm between the intricate, morally ambiguous world George R. R. Martin created and the narrative Benioff and Weiss were delivering on screen had become a yawning fissure. The latter seasons increasingly traded the novelistic complexity and…More
The Door (S6x05) Airdate: 22 May 2016 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Jack Bender Running Time: 57 minutes By the time *Game of Thrones* reached its sixth season, the series had irrevocably entered its post-literary phase. Having outpaced George R.R. Martin’s glacial literary output, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were left to drive the sprawling epic without the novelist’s intricate s…More
Book of the Stranger (S6x04) Airdate: 15 May 2016 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Daniel Sackheim Running Time: 58 minutes The fourth episode of *Game of Thrones*’ sixth season, *Book of the Stranger*, arrives as a corrective and a promise. Following the relatively pedestrian, business-like approach of *Oathbreaker*, which largely served to tie off lingering threads and reposition pieces, this i…More
Oathbreaker (S6x03) Airdate: 8 May 2016 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Daniel Sackheim Running Time: 52 minutes With the third episode of its sixth season, *Game of Thrones* returns, at least temporarily, to its regular narrative routine. After the shocking reveals of the first two episodes, *Oathbreaker* opts for a more measured, chess-piece-moving approach. It forgoes the practice of shock fo…More
Home (S6x02) Airdate: 1 May 2016 Written by: Dave Hill Directed by: Jeremy Podeswa Running Time: 53 minutes The sheer, sprawling epic scope of *Game of Thrones* has always been both its greatest boast and its most daunting narrative challenge. By its sixth season, the series had long accustomed its audience to the absence of key characters from entire episodes, a necessary evil of managing a cast of dozens across co…More
The Red Woman (S6x01) Airdate: 24 April 2016 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Jeremy Podeswa Running Time: 50 minutes By the time the fifth season of *Game of Thrones* had concluded, it was evident that showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were sailing through uncharted and increasingly perilous waters. The series had begun to seriously run out of its literary source in George R. R. Martin’s…More
Mother’s Mercy (S5x10) Airdate: 14 June 2015 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: David Nutter Running Time: 60 minutes For years, detractors of *Game of Thrones* enjoyed drawing a semi-humorous parallel between the sprawling fantasy epic and the glossy American primetime soap *Dynasty*. The comparison began as a witty observation—noting the structural similarities between the Red Wedding and *Dynasty…More
The Dance of Dragons (S5x09) Airdate: 7 June 2015 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: David Nutter Running Time: 52 minutes The decision to adapt George R.R. Martin’s sprawling epic *A Song of Ice and Fire* for television proved to be immensely rewarding for HBO and most of those involved. However, it carried one fundamental, crippling flaw: the source material was, and remains, unfinished. By the mi…More
Hardhome (S5x08) Airdate: 31 May 2015 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Miguel Sapochnik Running Time: 60 minutes By its midpoint, *Game of Thrones* had established a formidable tradition: if a truly grand, set-piece battle was to be depicted on screen, it would be saved for the penultimate episode of the season. From the *Blackwater* in Season 2 to the *Watchers on the Wall* in Season 4, the struc…More
The Gift (S5x07) Airdate: 24 May 2015 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Miguel Sapochnik Running Time: 58 minutes Following the profoundly contentious and narratively dubious conclusion of *Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken* – Sansa Stark’s brutal marital rape at the hands of Ramsay Bolton – the subsequent episode, *The Gif*”, initially presents itself as a formulaic calm before the storm. It adopts the se…More
Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken (S5x06) Airdate: 17 May 2015 Written by: Bryan Cogman Directed by: Jeremy Podeswa Running Time: 53 minutes From its very inception, *Game of Thrones* conditioned its audience to expect the worst. The brutal, unexpected death of Eddard Stark in the first season established a cardinal rule: no character, no matter how noble or ostensibly central, was safe. Over the subsequent years, viewers e…More
Kill the Boy (S5x05) Airdate: 10 May 2015 Written by: Bryan Cogman Directed by: Jeremy Podeswa Running Time: 50 minutes By the midpoint of its fifth season, *Game of Thrones* had settled into a rather predictable, if contentious, pattern of massive deviation from its literary source material. George R.R. Martin’s sprawling, unfinished saga presented an escalating challenge to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss…More
Sons of the Harpy (S5x04) Airdate: 3 May 2015 Written by: Dave Hill Directed by: Mark Mylod Running Time: 50 minutes The path taken by *Game of Thrones* in its fifth season, which began to significantly diverge the series’ plots from George R. R. Martin’s as-yet-unfinished literary source material, started to exert a palpable strain on the show’s internal logic and character integrity. While earlier seasons had take…More
High Sparrow (S5x03) Airdate: 26 April 2015 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Mark Mylod Running Time: 60 minutes The third episode of *Game of Thrones*’ fifth season, *High Sparrow*, continues the season’s trend of solid, deliberate plot advancement, delivering arguably one of the more devastating and depressing twists for a major character while also featuring some effective, if occasionally pede…More
The House of White and Black (S5x02) Airdate: 19 April 2015 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Michael Slovis Running Time: 55 minutes The second episode of Game of Thrones’ fifth season, “The House of Black and White,” is another solid instalment that efficiently advances the sprawling narrative while providing some increasingly rare examples of deliberate worldbuilding at this relatively late stag…More
Wars to Come (S5x01) Airdate: 12 April 2015 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Michael Slovis Running Time: 52 minutes Season 5 of *Game of Thrones* arrived with considerable expectation, yet its inaugural episode, *Wars to Come*, offered a curiously subdued and uneventful commencement. Functioning primarily as a narrative mop-up operation, the episode diligently tidied the sprawling aftermath of Se…More
The Children (S4x10) Airdate: 15 June 2014 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Alex Graves Running Time: 66 minutes When Season 4 of *Game of Thrones* drew to a close in June 2014, none of its millions of viewers—and, one suspects, not even the showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss—fully appreciated that the series had reached its narrative midpoint. With two more seasons originally planned and t…More
The Watchers on the Wall (S4x09) Airdate: 8 June 2014 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Neil Marshall Running Time: 50 minutes When *Game of Thrones* delivered *Blackwater*, the penultimate episode of its second season, it established a formidable precedent. It proved that the series could, and indeed should, dedicate an entire episode to a single, sprawling battle. If not the absolute best episode…More
The Mountain and the Viper (S4x08) Airdate: 1 June 2014 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Alex Graves Running Time: 52 minutes By the culmination of its fourth season, *Game of Thrones* stood at a pivotal and perilous crossroads. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, increasingly cognisant that the television narrative would irrevocably diverge from George R.R. Martin’s unfinished literary sour…More
Mockingbird (S4x07) Airdate: 18 May 2014 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Alik Sakharov Running Time: 51 minutes By its fourth season, *Game of Thrones* had firmly established a reliable, if increasingly predictable, formula for its “regular” episodes. These instalments function as narrative chessboards, methodically moving multiple storylines into position ahead of the grand finale or mid-season…More
The Laws of Gods and Men (S4x06) Airdate: 11 May 2014 Written by: Bryan Cogman Directed by: Alik Sakharov Running Time: 50 minutes Game of Thrones stands as the best-known and arguably the most popular fantasy series in the history of television, but throughout its run, it has consistently toyed with other, more generic genres – from action and adventure to horror, romance, and, as HBO’s mandate often ensured, eroti…More
First of His Name (S4x05) Airdate: 4 May 2014 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Michelle MacLaren Running Time: 53 minutes By the midpoint of its fourth season, *Game of Thrones* had reached a critical juncture. The sprawling, labyrinthine world of Westeros and Essos had been meticulously established for a global television audience, its complex web of families, allegiances, and historical grievanc…More
Oathkeeper (S4x04) Airdate: 27 April 2014 Written by: Bryan Cogman Directed by: Michelle MacLaren Running Time: 55 minutes The adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s sprawling literary saga *A Song of Ice and Fire* into the television phenomenon *Game of Thrones* was, from its inception, an exercise in necessary compromise. The book and the television series are two distinct media, with differing narrative economies and…More
Breaker of Chains (S4x03) Airdate: 20 April 2014 Written by: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Directed by: Alex Graves Running Time: 56 minutes Among enthusiasts and scholars of *Game of Thrones*, few debates inspire such fervent disagreement as the question of precisely when the series "jumped the shark." One of the earliest candidates, and perhaps the most chillingly prophetic, is *Breaker of Chains*, the third instalme…More
The Lion and the Rose (S4x02) Airdate: 13 April 2014 Written by: George R. R. Martin Directed by: Alex Graves Running Time: 52 minutes By the conclusion of its third season, *Game of Thrones* had cemented a grim reputation. For the majority of its audience—at least those unacquainted with George R.R. Martin’s source novels—the horrific climax of *The Rains of Castamere* delivered a brutal, paradigm-shifting realisat…More
Two Swords (S4x01) Airdate: 6 April 2014 Written by: D. B. Weiss & David Benioff Directed by: D. B. Weiss Running Time: 58 minutes By the time *Game of Thrones* reached its fourth season in 2014, its record with season-opening episodes was varied but generally successful. The premiere had evolved into a specific art form: a necessary recalibration of the sprawling chessboard after the cataclysmic events of a finale,…More
Mhysa (S03E10) Airdate: 9 June 2013 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: David Nutter Running Time: 63 minutes The seismic shock of *The Rains of Castamere* represented not merely a narrative high point for *Game of Thrones*, but the dramatic zenith of television in the early 21st century. The Red Wedding was a meticulously engineered catastrophe that redefined what epic fantasy could do on screen, b…More
Rains of Castamere (S03E09) Airdate: 3 June 2013 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: David Nutter Running Time: 51 minutes In television history, few phenomena have been as culturally dominant in their respective decades as *Dynasty* was in the 1980s and *Game of Thrones* in the 2010s. To the newer, perhaps more credulous viewer, HBO’s epic fantasy series was initially hailed as a revolutionary brea…More
Second Sons (S03E08) Airdate: 19 Many 2013 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Michelle MacLaren Running Time: 57 minutes The eighth episode of *Game of Thrones*’ third season, *Second Sons*, faced the unenviable but crucial task of positioning its slowly advancing chess pieces for the devastating gut-punches reserved for the season’s final two instalments. This narrative groundwork was achieved wit…More
The Bear and the Maiden Fair (S03E07) Airdate: 12 Many 2013 Written by: George R. R. Martin Directed by: Michelle MacLaren Running Time: 57 minutes The world of *A Song of Ice and Fire* is, by design, a brutal and uncompromisingly patriarchal one. George R. R. Martin’s literary endeavour has often been to interrogate this world not by forcing the reader to view it through the eyes of those it marginalises: the women…More
The Climb (S03E06) Airdate: 5 Many 2013 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Alik Sakharov Running Time: 54 minutes *Game of Thrones*’ third season established a now-familiar rhythm: a major, eventful episode would be followed by one of deliberate, often sluggish, consolidation. *The Climb* (S3E6) is a quintessential example of this pattern. Following the emotional and narrative crescendo of *Kissed…More
Kissed by Fire (S03E05) Airdate: 28 April 2013 Written by: Bryan Cogman Directed by: Alex Graves Running Time: 52 minutes The structural demands of television production, particularly within the rigid ten-episode seasonal format that *Game of Thrones* adhered to, often forced the adaptation to truncate George R.R. Martin’s sprawling narratives and accelerate plot momentum in ways the source material did not. Yet, du…More
And Now His Watch Has Ended (S03E04) Airdate: 21 April 2013 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: David Benioff Running Time: 52 minutes One of the defining traits that elevated *Game of Thrones* above its television contemporaries was its ruthless subversion of episodic pacing. Unshackled from the tradition of reserving cataclysmic events for season finales, the series conditioned its audience to exp…More
Walk of Punishment (S03E03) Airdate: 14 April 2013 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: David Benioff Running Time: 52 minutes From its inception, a defining characteristic of *Game of Thrones* was its authors’ tendency to shock viewers with devastating final scenes in certain episodes. These narrative hammer-blows became a signature structural device. Sometimes these attempts were profoundly effecti…More
Dark Wings, Dark Words (S03E02) Airdate: 7 April 2013 Written by: Vanessa Taylor Directed by: Daniel Minahan Running Time: 56 minutes The sheer scope of *Game of Thrones*, even in its third season, remained a potent source of surprise for that portion of the audience which had not ventured into George R.R. Martin’s source novels. For those unacquainted with *A Clash of Kings* or *A Storm of Swords*, upon which this…More
Valar Dohaeris (S03E01) Airdate: 31 March 2013 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Daniel Minahan Running Time: 54 minutes The third season of *Game of Thrones* arrived in the spring of 2013 at a moment of profound cultural coronation. No longer merely a successful television adaptation, the series had solidified its status as a global phenomenon. The characters, the dialogue, the iconography—from t…More
Valar Morghulis (S02E10) Airdate: 3 June 2012 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Alan Taylor Running Time: 64 minutes In its second season, *Game of Thrones* continued its established tradition of utilising the season finale not as a locus for cataclysmic, audience-shocking twists, but as a narrative mop-up operation. The penultimate episode, *Blackwater*, delivered the season’s undeniable ‘wham’ m…More
Blackwater (S02E09) Airdate: 27 May 2012 Written by: George R. R. Martin Directed by: Neil Marshall Running Time: 55 minutes For a series that had, by its second season, already ensnared a vast and varied audience, *Game of Thrones* was famously parsimonious with its spectacle. Some viewers were genuine aficionados of high fantasy, others were drawn to the intricate web of political melodrama, and a not-insignifican…More
The Prince of Winterfell (S02E08) Airdate: 20 May 2012 Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss Directed by: Alan Taylor Running Time: 53 minutes By its second season, *Game of Thrones* had begun to exhibit an intriguing, if frustrating, narrative paradox. Individual episodes often felt simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished—a stark contrast to the laser-focused, tightly coiled storytelling of Season 1. That d…More
