That rare moment when the studio wanted to be "faithful" to the source material and the writers wanted a cash grab

Every time I think "I should rewatch Game of Thrones!" I remember S8 and exactly why I can't rewatch Game of Thrones.

The real crime was not handing the show over when GRRM's material ran out. D&D had no right to complain about being fatigued when they could have passed the show over to fresher and more committed writers.

The saddest thing for me is that the cast was so insanely good and talented, every role matched perfectly and the acting was outstanding, I don't even know if a reshoot with different cast would come close to this...

I'm not questioning your writing ability, I'm denying its existence.

The most Game of Thrones moment was when they killed the fanbase overnight. Nobody saw that coming.

Never forget that they didn’t ‘run out of material’ they literally cut about 4 seasons worth of content from the Novels….THAT WERE ALREADY OUT BEFORE SEASON 1 DROPPED. They cut all of Dorne They cut all of Griff story They neutered Danys story to be way less complex They neutered all the prophecies literally None payed off.

Oh right, how could I forget that being a parent or playing football takes away your ability to enjoy fantasy, one of the most widespread and historically beloved literary genres of all time

The fact we could have had 13 seasons of this show is probably one of the most depressing things I’ve ever heard...

Bran saying "why do you think i came all this way" is literally the most annoying thing ever

I remember back in 2012-2013, D & D were praised as one of the best screenwriters in the world due to the enormous success of the GOT. Little did the audience know back then that the whole success of the show was based on the original source material provided by GRRM.

They strike me as guys who were well-off in upbringing, allowing them to have connections or entry into hollywood and tv. They have such little talent, I can't imagine that they actually impressed their ways to success. I went to school with a guy of such background. He couldn't write a script or plot to save his life, but was always assuring our professors and classmates in my screen writing classes he was going to Hollywood. I was mind blown when he actually had a movie come out, and it was complete trash....Dude was by far the least talented person i'd ever had classes with and yet the only one that I know of that made it, all because of connections.

The most frustrating part is just knowing how ungrateful they were. Literally any TV writer would KILL for a job like this a HUGE salary, great cast, massive budget, and the freedom to go on for as many seasons as you pleased...... But in the end they both completely took it for granted, and saw it as an anchor as opposed to an opportunity.

"We wanted parents to love it and people who play professional football to love it" WHAT? what the fuck was that supposed to mean?

It's kind of satisfying to learn about their downfall but it breaks my heart that they are still working. There are so many young talented writers who are desperate for jobs meanwhile these guys keep messing up and keep getting more opportunities and money.... smh

I find it funny when people assume "parents" don't like fantasy elements in their favorite shows. Like fantasy is a brand new genre only teenagers understand or something. Don't they know about the popularity of "The lord of the rings " back in the day? People have been enjoying fantasy for a long time (since humanity exist, if I have to guess). My love for fantasy started as a teenager in the 80's. I'm now a middle age mom and guess what, fantasy and science fiction are my favorite genres still. They personally know one of the biggest nerds, George Rr Martin, who's kind of old, and they still have this stupid preconceived notion about fantasy?

The success of Got was never thanks to D&D. It's all Martin's work. Without him and the source material they showed complete lack of writing skills. Downfall? Nahhh they were never at the top.

It still surprises me how little people even talk about this show anymore. It dominated popular culture for almost a decade and because of how it ended it's been collectively wiped from people's memories. I was obsessed with it when it was airing but now I can't even face rewatching it as I know how it ends.

I remember I found out about David Benioff’s other work when GoT was still in its prime and I found it encouraging like just because you had a few flops doesn’t mean you can’t have success too. I really should have seen it as a warning of what was to come.

They stated that half the reason they wanted to make the show was for the red wedding. They stated how there were individual moments that blew their mind. That’s part of the problem. They didn’t see the whole story. They only saw massive cool looking moments that subverted expectations. They heard Dany burns King’s Landing and only cared about the shocking moment. They didn’t care about developing Dany properly to reach that moment. They didn’t care about any pacing at all. They heard Bran becomes king and didn’t care about showing his true journey to get there. They didn’t care about letting each lord and lady from each house connect with Bran and gain enough respect and trust for him to bend the knee. That’s why it feels undeserving. Literally nobody outside the north had any reason to kneel to Bran. He didn’t do anything for many houses to see but act as night king bait. They heard Arya stops the white walkers and didn’t care about making it believable. They just had her run right by his entire army to kill him, because they didn’t care about anything besides the “wow she stabbed the night king” moment. They heard Jon kills Dany and didn’t care about developing both of them. They are ice and fire. Their romance is what the story was going towards. They didn’t care about the journey for those two. They only cared about the “wow Jon just killed Dany” moment. The red wedding was so impactful because of the story leading up to it. It wasn’t just subverting expectations and being shocking. The story is what everybody on earth cared about most except the writers of the show.

Lets not forget David Benioff bragged that "Themes are for grade school essays" while being the head writer for the most thematically dense series

Until my Last breath I will remember what they did to season 8.

Imagine how even more insanely popular this show would have been if they had decided to break it down into more seasons, during the pandemic.

nearly one year later, i have barely survived the pain of the finale and am only now tiptoe-ing into critique videos to revisit the grave of one of the best shows ever. sadness infinity.

D&D: We are the writers! Tywin: Any men who must say 'We are the writers' are no true writers.

I think that the worst part is that they wouldn't pass it on to somebody else. They deserve to never work again.

Imagine having the full backing of HBO and not going all out to make a masterpiece.

I feel like the decisions made by D&D cannot be understated: - They came up with the one of the most rushed endings of all time, ignoring all the stories and plotlines given to them at that point. Ruining rewatchability and wiping the show clean from our memories - this undoubtedly probably had an effect on martins motivation to complete his books. I mean he gave d&d the ending which im sure they followed in the seasons. The problem is the reception was so bad im sure it impacts his motivation on the project - the biggest issue is their pride. They felt like they were bigger than the show and the books. So they rushed together some piece of crap. Rather than giving up their role to some other writers which would have extended the show to 13 seasons and given it the ending it deserved, they chose to rush it because they felt they were the reason for its success. I truly hope they never get a chance to work on something like this again. You cant have pride and arrogance impact the good of a project that peoples have poured their time and energy in (the author, the actors, fans).

what *should* have happened HBO- “we want 13 seasons” D&d - “we got 8” HBO -“GTFO”

It's over 2 years later and I'm still outraged at how all this ended.

D&D reminds me of a quote from a certain abridged series. The quote is: “Screw the rules, I have money.” That’s exactly why D&D got so far in Hollywood. They were able to disregard all the rules of telling a story and got far because they come from money. Nepotism rules Hollywood.

I always knew I didn't like Troy (2004) for some reason, then after a rewatch I realised David Benioff was one of the writers and then suddenly it all made sense

If D&D were worn out, then they should’ve passed GOT on to new writers. It would’ve saved their reputations and GOT would’ve gotten the proper seasons it deserved.

It doesn't bother me that these guys are insanely rich. Money in the end means very little. I do enjoy the fact that everyone agrees that they're hacks and terrible writers. Their legacy will always be one of failure.

GRRM: "the show needs 13 seasons" Also GRRM: can't write 2 books

The existence and quality of HOTD is proof that D&D could've simply stepped back into exec producer roles and let someone else handle the day to day stuff on GOT. I don't doubt how time consuming and exhausting the job was but to handle it this way was SO wrong. Their slide back into obscurity is much deserved

"We wanted families to love it" I'm sorry *WHAT*

Let's be honest here. They didn't "walk away" from Star Wars. They most definitely got fired, and Disney gave them the courtesy of saying it was a "mutual agreement". The situation is exactly what they deserve. They were two petty men with fragile egos that preferred short-term pettiness and ended with longterm consequences. Not fully, of course seeing as they still got a $200m deal from Netflix; but this world isn't always fair. They LOVED to flex their power. They took their negative reputation on set in stride and enjoyed the fear they would instill on the cast; the infamous "dinner call" that the cast talked about. If D&D invited you to dinner, your character was finished. I recall them once telling a story on tv that they would use that reputation to scare various members into thinking their characters were getting killed off. Furthermore, how they treated Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington says a lot about these two narcissists. When it comes to Kit - it was literally nothing more than David Benioff being petty because his wife found Kit Harington attractive and publicly admitted to a reporter that she found him attractive. This was back in 2015, when Season 6 should have started filming. What happened in Season 6 and onward? Nothing but Jon Snow degradation. Minimal/idiotic dialogue and stabs at his character from others in the show. He has a small pecker, and he's overall small. Jesus, how many times did we hear about how small Jon Snow was? As for Emilia Clarke, she started to stand up for herself - and that's a big no no. We know she was taken advantage of in Season 1 as an up and coming actress, performing as nude as possible for the cameras. If you think she was naked too much in Season 1, then thank Jason Momoa because he protected her from the writers and directors from trying to get her to get more naked than was shown. And as the years passed, Emilia Clarke started taking other roles in Hollywood and was being respected. So, she put her foot down and she paid the ultimate price for it in the end - the assassination of her character. Listen, whether you think Dany was going to go crazy or not is not the argument - it's with how they went about it and basically forced Emilia to find out on her own what route Daenerys would take. She didn't know Daenerys' fate until she was emailed the script, along with the rest of the cast. She said that she felt numb and devastated when she had finished reading it. Kit Harington didn't even read the script until the entire cast got together, and even he was devastated with the reveal of events. For a plot point that was apparently planned and known about for years (doubt), them not revealing it to Emilia Clarke was pretty shitty. Especially considering that Emilia would preach about Daenerys with pride and happiness, unaware to what would eventually become. However, the most damning evidence of their nature would be in regards to Ian McElhinney (the actor of Ser Barristan Selmy). Ian was disappointed in his character's fate and wrote a letter to D&D expressing how he thought it was a mistake to kill Ser Barristan so early on and that the character still had much to offer both to the show and as Daenerys' advisor (people who've read the books know that Ian was spitting nothing but FACTS). How did Dan and Dave respond to this letter? By going public and on tv, mocking the letter to an audience and smugly saying, "the letter just made us want to kill off the character even more." They just can't handle that they're nobodies and have zero talent for writing. When Nikolaj Coster-Waldau would bring grievances about Jaime Lannister's character and how he thought they were going the wrong way about it, these two assholes would just brush him off and say that the would take it into consideration, ie "shut up and act. Let us do the thinking." I have no sympathy for these two whatsoever.

I hated the show since season 5, and everyone called me crazy. Then late season 7 and all of season 8, people suddenly started to see things differently.

I’m so jealous of them I wish I could be terrible in my work and be paid millions to do it

They destroyed the show that gave them everything.

Imaging having Bran as a character, he knows everything that happened, he can be everywhere and you choose to do absolutely nothing with him. You have him sitting around, doing nothing only to deliver a stupid line in the last episode.

David and Dan Actually led the charge to try and get game of thrones put onto the screen. Initially they worked their asses off but unfortunately with success came complacency and then came boredom. I got to give them credit for getting the show off thr ground. I also though blame them for not stepping back when their hearts where not in it. After season 5 they should have scouted for new show runners and fresh writers had them join the production and then lay the mantle on their shoulders and just stay on as regular producers.

How often do you hear studios say they will do ANYTHING to back a show? They had the full support of HBO, a cast that often told them what fell out of place, an author who's very much alive....

Let's be brutally honest season 7&8 are the results of giving d&d too much credit for being glorified copy editors

My dad was a big GoT show fan and when he died in early 2019 I thought "damn he won't get to see the finale now" after seeing it I'm glad he didn't have to endure that before dying.

Seasons 1-4: greatly adapted literature, focused on intrigue, well-developed characters and impressive worldbuilding. Seasons 5-8: mediocre TV, fed on star power, stereotypes, technical proficiency and mindless spectacle.

The 3 Body Problem is one of the best Sci-fi stories EVER written... and Netflix is letting D&D develop it?! 🤦🏻‍♀️😣 Why can't we have anything nice anymore???

It's been over a year, and I'm still not over GOT S8

I love how they are now remembered as the guys who ruined Game of Thrones

This is one of the few channels on youtube where I always assume content is good and I'm never disappointed.

"We tried to keep that stuff to a minimum, because we didn't just want it to appeal to a fantasy fanbase. We wanted them to love it, and we wanted parents to love it, and people who played professional football to love it." The messed up part is... THEY HAD THAT BEFORE THE DOWNPLAY. Game of Thrones was well on its way to becoming a part of the cultural zeitgeist (at least in America, I cannot speak of the rest of the world), which normally takes years, if not DECADES, to occur. And that was WITH the fantasy elements and magick. Everybody had heard of it, even one of my friends who won't watch something if it isn't anime or an internet animation/show. So many people were talking about it. It was a cultural phenomenon, on a similar level as Star Wars. And they literally cut out one of its core elements to appeal to people to which it already appealed... Dumb & Dumber were blind. It fell out of the zeitgeist incredibly fast because of those two idiots. I rarely hear anybody talking about it in a good light, and even then, it's only about seasons 1-4/5, or about the music.

Actually, Benioff probably got the job because his rich dad is friends with the guy who was in charge of HBO at the time.

It is very infuriating to hear Dan say that we wanted parents and athletes to watch the show as well. Is he not aware that it was the biggest show on the planet which pretty much meant many parents and athletes do watch it already? What made GoT special was the very fantasy aspects of it that were grounded with the human characters and realities of human conflict and war. How do you run a fantasy show and decide to remove or minimize the fantasy element of it when you are reaching the climax of the story where you have to resolve plot points and character arch’s set up previously. I think the asshat literally meant it in the worst way possible: basically that we want to gain audiences that are not nerds aka people who have sex (parents & athletes). No wonder their inner frat boy shines through in the writing of the last 2 seasons with constant dick jokes, dumb character decisions, bastardizing great lines from previous seasons and “kind of” forgetting how to write a good story.

what upsets me the most is that people have started defending season 8

I will never get tired of videos like this. Pump the D&D hate into my veins.

I would've waited another 3 years if it meant that the last few seasons had book material.

The fact that David and Dan are not part of the House of Dragon series is most likely good riddance.

The downfall of David and Dan can be explained by them no longer having work to adapt. To be clear, writing adaptions is an incredibly difficult skill, so this isn't a knock on their ability. They just aren't great at writing original content. Their strengths come from their ability to adapt previously written material for the screen: they know what plot-lines, dialogue, and character arcs fit best in the TV format. Writing original content is an entirely different job.

Imagine tanking your own career this hard. They had everything going for them, they could have gotten a job anywhere with people bending over backwards to accommodate them, and their own arrogance ruined it for them.

"We wanted to appeal to professional football players..." WTF does that even mean??!! LMAO

The worst thing in this mess is knowing that we'll never get the proper ending to the story, in the way it was intended. George wasn't in a hurry to write his books long before the show started, and now he's just too old, his giving the roadmap for the ending to the show was saying he's done with the whole thing. D&D took a good thing, a masterpiece even, and killed it in this horrible way because they were "tired". Now that's a crime, I say whatever hate they get they deserve it tenfold

I had no idea Benioff was the one who ruined Deadpool and nearly deprived us of Ryan Reynolds' depiction of the character entirely. Kinda suprised they didn't reference that in Deadpool 2's ending.

Imagine all the hard-working aspiring writers: taking classes, courses, books, working hours and hours on their craft, not submitting a single page until they go through it a thousand times, taking the little money they have for an editor AND these two get high positions?? I mean how?? just how is this possible?? Hollywood gets literally a million of manuscripts from writers everyday and these two are the ones who get chosen??? and no, don't tell me these two write better than a 15-year-old taking a creative class. I'm pretty sure at best it's the same level.

You know, it's kind of funny how Benihoff's dad was Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank in 2008 (at the same time as being on the board of Goldman Sachs, which was crazy unethical) and used his position to personally benefit from the 2008 crash...and yet David Benihoff still manages to be the most hated member of his family.

Meanwhile, George R R Martin is already moved on to write the dialogues for House of The Dragon, finishing Winds of Winter (which we don't know when it will release) and even helping Hidetaka Miyazaki to write the dialogues and world building on Elden Ring. Even Elden Ring won Game of The Year of 2022.

Bran: "Why do you think I came all this way?" Also Bran replying to Tyrion: "And I don't want to be king"

Only thing that has been consistantly good throughout all the seasons was Ramin Djawadis soundtrack.

YOU MEAN TO TELL, THEY COULD OF GIVEN THE SHOW TO SOMEONE ELSE 😭 AND THEY SAID NO 💀

"Kind of forgot about Eurons fleet" those words...😵‍💫

I still search for them sometimes but this is still one of the only 2 videos on them in the past year.

It still makes me sad thinking that this show could have had 13 seasons.

Every time D&D make a writing decision, the gods flip a coin.

He wrote X-Men origins? Oh fuck that explains a lot

Here’s the mistake: “We didn’t want the story to only be X. So we changed it to appeal to Y and Z also.” That’s fine if you’re writing an original story, and you’re drafting and coming up with plot points and forming it into what it will become. But for this show, where they are adapting an already existing narrative, the question ought to have been “what is the story that George was trying to tell, and how do we tell that story on film?”

So the moral of the story is never watch anything related with D&D

"Dany kinda forgot about the Iron Fleet" is much funnier when you know David said it, not Daniel Weiss

Well done!

it amazes me tho, how those two still have a job in the industry when there's probably a million people out there who could do better than them that just haven't been able to break through or be offered an opportunity. it's sad, it's unfair, it's infuriating.

When they said they toned down the 'fantasy' side of the show to appeal to other ppl is like wtf, are we still in high school?

My red flag was whenever they made euron a popstar medieval guy

We should still be pushing for a redo of those seasons.

D&D are the ones to blame. But GRRM being a full Robert Baratheon when it comes to finishing those damn books should definitely get more attention.

D&D need to do the walk of shame like Cersei did, LOL

2D "backed out" of the Star Wars deal like Bran backed out of that window.

You know, this is actually very sad and painful, and not just for the fans but the staff that was involved. Imagine, the actors gave their best, the music team, the people that made the clothes and accessories, the producers, the ambience, the decoration staff, the CGI team, special effects, and so on... All of them did their best and made a masterpiece with their work, hours of hard work...all to be ruined and overshadowed by the stupidity of these two and their stupid writing.

There are so many talented writers still working hard for a chance. it boils my blood seeing a relentless hacks like these getting all the opportunities and not using single one of them

I hope if George R R Martin will ever finish his books, they will reboot the series, with normal writers.

Hearing D&D talking about wanting to take out the fantasy elements so that "parents" and "professionals" can enjoy it just shows that they, along with many other "writers", think that fantasy is a lesser genre compared to others. I'm so sick of fantasy being considered juvenile and/or lesser. It is an amazing genre that allows for so many different and exciting things. Screw off with your holier than thou attitude.

"we wanted parents to love it and people who play professional football to love it" bro 💀 fantasy isn't limited to children or an occupation lmaoo

Dumb and Dumber: “We got rid of certain fantasy elements because we wanted parents ….. and and and…. Football players ….. and….” Excuse me. WUT!!!???

"We didn't want to just appeal to fantasy fans, we also wanted parents to love it-" Are you freaking kidding me?

This vid should be called the Trial of David and Dan.

I feel like “Winter” never came… Also… why would wanna downplay the fantasy elements? Along with the politics, wars, battles, scheming and great dialogue, it’s literally one of the most interesting aspects of the lore… dragons, witches, ice zombies, prophecies, magical walls, children of the forest, time travel

Great analysis!

Benioff’s career is what happens when nepotism is regarded over the art.

I love how he keeps calling them “dumb and dumber” lol EDIT: DAAAMN LOOK AT ALL THEM LIKES

I hope Netflix keep the receipt, because they'll need it

I wonder if we'll ever get a GoT remake once all the books are out. I'd love to see it done in 20 years time.

The last 2 seasons should have proved, it wasn't them, it was George's source material that made that series great.