Television Spectacle

What Game of Thrones did was turn television into an event the world attended all at once. 59 Emmy wins, 159 nominations. By the numbers as well, it stands among the summits of television history. The viewing figures for the final episode make a fine lesson in this map’s talk about units. HBO announced 19.3 million. But that combines the linear broadcast with HBO Go and HBO Now; the broadcast itself was 13.6 million. Season 8 was also announced as an average of 44.2 million per episode, but that is a cumulative figure that stacks up repeats and catch-up streaming. All three are correct, and all three are different rulers. When you line numbers up, you have to say which one was measured, or the meaning changes. This show also made history in how it ended. An online petition asking for the final season to be remade drew more than 1.7 million signatures. That so many people were genuinely angry about the ending of one story is itself evidence of how far television had come. The network declined to remake it. The lineage of sheer scale runs on into House of the Dragon, and, with a change of material, into THE LAST OF US (→ The Limited Series Returns).