HBO Commit To Game Of Thrones

HBO are in love with their serialized epic, Game Of Thrones. And who can blame them? The show’s debut season succeeded where many fail - introducing a world and characters that viewers find compelling, while delivering upward momentum in the ratings.

Earlier this week, HBO co-president Richard Plepler went as far as to say the network would have Game for as long as George R.R. Martin‘s fingers and imagination can churn out stories. Unlike Deadwood, this is one serialized favorite they dont plan to pan anytime soon.

Said Plepler: “We told [author George R.R. Martin] we’d go as long as he keeps writing.”

With HBO programming president Michael Lombardo, adding:

“I hope it lasts for 20 years.“I promise you we won’t stop it before it’s ready to stop … There’s a great relationship fans have with the show and we appreciate that. We’ve never seen people get so excited about casting [decisions].”
“I don’t know where the show ends compared to the books. We’re doing this without any predetermined number of seasons.”

The execs also addressed one of the big series complaints – only running 10 episodes per season. Lombardo explained that doing more than 10 episodes per year would mean that fans would have to wait longer between seasons and quality could suffer:

“The challenge on a show like Thrones is if we could do 12, we would. To produce those shows in the time they have, there’s no way they could physically do more than 10 than for without diluting the quality of the execution.”

That’s understandable, especially when considering how much goes into realizing the series, from a cost and production standpoint alone. But with so many serials going for shorter seasons of late, audiences of our brand of television may start feeling deprived of those longer story arcs.

Shorter seasons are much more common on cable, but some of the most anticipated broadcast series of 2011-12 are also on shorter runs, among them Terra Nova and Alcatraz. There are definitely considerations to be made for and against shorter seasons, but I do like to like my 22 episode serials.

Still, this is a wider discussion that we’ll no doubt come back to. At the end of the day it’s difficult to knock those 10 quality Thrones episodes that took us on one heck of a ride. It wasn’t perfect, but at this stage I can only see them getting better and better the longer they go on.

And perhaps they can squeeze out eleven episodes for season 3? I’d take one episode of this alone: