I’ve always thought that 1 hour was not enough for each episode, given how many different storylines there are in GoT.
A better experience would be if each episode was 1.5 hours. 2 hours seems a bit too long. 1.5 hours would give the director more time to expand on some of the characters & storylines.
An even better idea I think would be if there were three episodes/series per week.
[ul]
[li]The current Game of Thrones series, as is[/li][li]A “spinoff” focusing on the storylines with Kings Landing, Stannis, etc[/li][li]Another spinoff focusing on the storylines with Daenerys, Braavos, etc[/li][/ul]
The spinoffs would be shown on Tue & Thu, and the original series would stay on Sundays. Things could be constructed such that you could delve deeper into the series and watch the spinoffs if you wanted to, but you could just watch the original series and not lose any significant plot points.
What do you guys think of the above ideas? Not that they will ever happen, but just fun to think about what would make viewers happier.
Would 1.5 hours be too long? Would having the spinoffs lead to GoT fatigue?
I’m feeling fatigue for it as-is. I wait until I can get the DVDs on NetFlix, and right now I’m decidedly “Meh” about the wait for the new season.
I feel like one of the major problems is how much ground the series is trying to cover. They’re just trying to do too much. Even without all the torture, random killings and generally unlikable people, there are twice as many characters as I can even try to care about. The rest are just so much background noise to me; the writers should have just written it that way.
The TV series has, like, 1/4 the characters of the books. Just in this last episode (no spoiler) we see the roles of two book characters combined in the show. Just you can ignore some of them, yeah. I do get confused sometimes, like how e.g. Galbart Glover is a character, but you wouldn’t know that because I don’t think he’s named or anything more than a background guy.
Stannis is not “the current Game of Thrones series”? King’s Landing!? The point is that the plot threads come together. You can’t do that if they’re separate series. Increasing the episode length and/or the season length could work. I think I prefer the latter - I am sad when the episode ends, but don’t feel throughout that it was too short. Also, 3 series sounds like a logistical nightmare as far as plotting. I don’t want to make it harder on them! I think the main limiting factor is budget.
Also, if you focus too much on one person, spoilers suggest that that person will (continue) to be important. Like if the main series was all about Hodor, you know he’s the king.
One of the things that makes the show interesting is that we see Westeros from so many different angles. If you do spinoffs, you lose that and you may create too much content for reasonable human beings to keep up with. As it is the series is so far-ranging that it’s easy to lose track of certain characters and storylines.
One issue with your idea is that GoT is based upon a series of books. HBO’s show has been about as faithful to the source material as one could possibly expect. But even the show has had to pull plotlines from a future book or make them up altogether in order to pad out the show and give each viewpoint character enough to do for the season. I can’t even imagine what they’d have to do if each section of Westeros got a dedicated 10 episodes for their plotline.
Just because certain characters & story lines seem far apart, future plot developments could reduce that distance. As others have pointed out, certain characters go through “slow” periods in the books. The showrunners are already adjusting things a bit–usually, doing rather well.
Mostly, I don’t think the production company could handle making more shows per year than they do…
Ha, your idea is remarkably similar to what happened in the book series. Book 4 is like King’s Landing plus some new spinoffs. (Dorne, Iron Islands, Braavos, the journey of Brienne) The first 2/3 of book 5 covers the Tues/Thurs series – Theon, Tyrion, Jon, Danaerys.
The series is going to have to cover things very differently than the book order going forward, but I expect them to make some large cuts.
I think it’s better to make 4 separate series, rather than 5 minutes per week of your favorite storyline. It’s just cruel, imho, to cliffhanger your favorite character then make you wait months for the result. If it was the book, you could just flip forward to see what happened.
I read the books and some of the storylines like this were spaced so incredibly far apart (like a book and a half before Sean Bean’s wife’s return, for example) that by the time they show up I just didn’t care anymore.
I’ll point out the obvious: HBO makes their money from subscriptions. How many people subscribe to HBO because of game of thrones? Quite a few, I’d imagine. How many people don’t bother to sign up just for Game of Thrones, but would sign up if there were 3 or 4 different series? Not many, since anyone interested is already subscribed.
So you’d triple your costs for almost no additional revenue.