With the Game of Thrones television show outpacing the books almost entirely for the first time, there are a lot of nervous fans out there wondering if showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss can keep up the quality without sweet, sweet George R.R. Martin source material to draw from. Certain misadventures in Dorne last year only upped the anxiety many fans have been feeling as season six approaches.
But if they’ve laid an egg of a non-dragon variety, they don’t know it. From looking at the finished product, Benioff and Weiss sound like they couldn’t be happier the way everything has turned out:
“The whole season,” Benioff replied. “Dan and I talk about this a lot. This is not us trying to hype it. Usually there’s an episode or two we’re kind of nervous about, that didn’t turn out as well as we hoped. This season there is not a weak episode. We had great directors who knew what they were doing, paired with excellent [directors of photography]. We thought at the script stage it might be our strongest season. Then the episodes came in better than we hoped. We’re always reluctant to say it’s ‘the best season yet’ because so much of that is in the eyes of the beholder. And Dan and I are so close to it that it’s impossible to be unbiased. But that’s my sense – watching them all together now, this is the best one we’ve done. It’s also the one I’m proudest of, because it was the hardest.”
This is extremely reassuring to read. HBO’s Game of Thrones has nailed enough moments perfectly that you can trust Dave and Dan to recognize when they’ve done something great … and when something — like the scrapped original pilot — is “a complete piece of sh*t.” They understand how important this moment is as George R.R. Martin passes them the torch to carry forward, and hearing them say the finished product is “our strongest season” gives me hope that season six will live up to the lofty expectations book readers and fans of the show alike have. April 24 can’t come soon enough!
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
