Kate Arthur of Buzzfeed recently took on the noble/insane task of breaking down the third season of HBO’s Game of Thrones by individual character screen time, and in the process revealed something interesting that everybody already knew: Tyrion Lannister dominates, always. According to Arthur’s math, the only redeemable member of the Lannister family spent 1:10:38 on screen last season, which clocks in at just over 20 minutes more than the runner-up, Daenerys Targaryen. This is how she came up with the figures:
The 10-episode third season added up to 8 hours and 43 minutes in total, excluding opening and closing credits. I re-watched it twice, and timed each scene from beginning to end and noted the characters within. If a character entered mid-scene, I counted them as being in the whole thing (the actor was on set that day, and was key to it, after all). There are scenes in which a character or characters are in the background (Tyrion and Sansa’s wedding springs to mind) and the actors don’t have any lines (or have one or two), but I counted those for the same reason — better to round up. I rounded way up with the dragons; there are scenes when they aren’t pivotal, but are in the distance, flying behind Dany. But who am I to say that the Mother of Dragons was not using her children effectively in those scenes to intimidate her foes? So, I counted them.
The full list is over at Buzzfeed, but here’s one other entry that jumped out at me: noted rat-faced weasel Joffrey Baratheon was on screen for a grand total of 33:47. This is excellent news for Fox, because now that I know this I can officially bump the Dads pilot down to #2 on my list of half hours of television from this year that made me blindingly angry.
