WHAT WENT WRONG - Game of Thrones (Pilot)

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

How did two lowly squires, an outsider king, and a network known more for sex than sorcery come together to make one of the most successful TV shows of all time? By completely botching it the first time around. This week, Chris & Lizzie brave the Hollywood game of thrones to learn what went wrong making Game of Thrones, from bad wigs and green screen White Walkers to ridiculous hats and the importance of second chances.*ADDENDUM: David Benioff had crucially penned 2004’s Troy prior to Game of Thrones, as well. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone not a movie at all, but a sprawling fantasy series that maybe sprawled a little too hard by the end. But today, we're going to focus on where it all began. I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here, as always, with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do you have for us today? That's right, we have game of Game of Thrones, the pilot, which, if you think about it, from a budgetarian scheduling perspective, was basically a well-budgeted independent film. And it had a notoriously troubled production. I am sure that our listeners have heard vague rumblings, rumors of troubled sets and far-off lands. And today we're going to get to the details and learn to separate fact from fiction, myth from man. Lizzie, I'm assuming you had seen Game of

Thrones before. What were your thoughts upon watching and or re-watching this seminal? And I use that word specifically, episode of television for the podcast. Well, first of all, I am very excited to talk about this. I don't know a ton about the production of the pilot outside of, you know, I know some people were recast. It's about all I know. So going in pretty blind, purposely did not look up stuff ahead of this. So I can't wait to hear what you have to tell us. Yes, of course, I have seen Game of Thrones. I've seen the pilot. This came out. What year did this come out? 2011. 2011. Okay. So we had like just graduated college. This was a big deal. This was like, I felt like this is one of the first shows that I owned as an adult, if that makes sense.

It was yours. It's mine. It's mine. It's mine, my own, my precious. There it is. And I was excited to watch the pilot again. I put it on. God, it's really good. It's really, really good. It's almost a bummer because the show ultimately fails to deliver, I think, on the level of

entertainment that it sets up in the first episode. There's even some things in the first episode that, you know, appear to be clues that may return later that I don't think ever come back. But it's just, it's so good. And it's one of those things where there's almost no recognizable faces in this. There's Sean Bean, of course, which I know we're going to talk about. And then to a certain extent, Peter Dinklage, but even Peter Dinklage, not super well known prior to this show. I really like that.

And I wish that more shows, particularly ensemble pieces, cough, cough, knives out, would go that route. Because not having recognizable faces allows me to enter the world and enter the story immediately without many preconceived notions. at all. It's just great. I can't wait to hear more about it. I forgot how good Nikolai Koster Waldo is. He's very charming. That is such a shocking reveal at the end of the first episode. And also, it's really impressive that they make it to three different locations, essentially, in this first episode. And unlike some other recent epic series, I am neither confused nor bored, which is, you know, that's pretty impressive because we are both at Winterfell, we're at King's Landing, and then of course we are with DeNaris and the Dothraki. The Dothraki Sea. Chris, what about you? I have a slightly

different take here. I quite liked Game of Thrones the first few seasons when it was on. I watched the show fairly consistently. I believe you're speaking when you say that it eventually fails to deliver on the promise of the pilot. I believe you're referring more to, I don't want to speak for you, but the last couple of seasons, perhaps, and in particular the finale. The seasons, the season's that they were writing where they had extended beyond the books that George R.R. Martin had written, yes. Right. So beyond the fifth season, there are five published books. Yes, it's pretty rough.

So I've read the books. I had read them before I'd seen the show. I like the pilot. I think the pilot is still a little rocky, in my opinion. Now, a lot of that's hindsight and storytelling continues to improve. For example, I think Sean Bean, as you mentioned, is impeccably cast. Jason Momoa has... called Drogo, and he was a relative unknown at this point in time. And candidly, most of the women in the pilot, I mean, Lena Hedy, Michelle Fairley, Amelia Clark, they all fit in, I think, very seamlessly right away. I actually think a lot of the men struggle to find their footing in the pilot. I think even Dinklage, I'm not 100% sure if he's landed the character yet. That's not his fault. That's

his die job. His hair is so bad in the pilot. They do lighten up on the hair and we'll get into some hair problems. Yes. I think they kind of hit his tone later in the episode when, you know, he makes the comment to John Snow, all dwarves are all imps are bastards in the eyes of their fathers, that sardonic sense of humor. Koster Waldow similarly, he's a little bit, I think, to Devil Make Hair Devin'Ever and this, again, I think he starts to find the balance later.

Kit Harrington is so self-serious. I think we start to find the balance. Well, that remains through the whole series. Sure. My point, though, is I think a lot of the men grow into their roles over the course of the show, which I do appreciate. And what I think is interesting is it opens with this very cinematic horror intro beyond the wall with the White Walkers and the Knights Wash. And it remains extremely compelling, scary, well-choreographed. And then the actual episode becomes far more soapish and melodramatic than I remember. But that's totally fine.

very much what this show is. It is swords and sorcery, not so much sorcery until later season, nudity, violence. But the world building, I do think is great, Lizzie. I think they do a great job of grounding us, as you mentioned, in a number of locations, unlike, look, I'll call it out the Rings of Power, which has wonderful visual effects. Yeah. It feels like everything's visual effects in that show. And so as a result, I don't ever feel settled in a real world in the way that I do in Game of Thrones, where it just feels cold and kind of gritty and it probably smells bad. Yeah, there's a couple things that stood out to me in this pilot. There's, when Circe gets out of the carriage at the very beginning at Winterfell and the bottom of

her cloak is just soaked in mud, like a foot up soaked in mud. I love those kind of details. One of my favorite parts of the entire episode is when Catlin Stark looks over at Sansa and she's like, where is your sister? And the like, bored sell and shrug that Sophie Turner gives is so good. It's such a just like normal teenage girl thing to do. And I love that they keep things like that in this world because it immediately makes them so much more human than, you know, frankly, something like Rings of Power where it felt like no one was allowed to have a sense

of humor or, you know, have different emotions other than stoicism. I agree. And I think this show does a very good job of showing how even the most epic of struggles for power come down in many instances to petty squabbles, interpersonal dispute. personality clashes, a lack of recognition in the part of one important character that the folks around him may not have his best interests at heart. And so I agree. I think it is very grounded in personal motivations. And that is such a refreshing turn when you are inside of a genre where it could often feel like very starkly drawn binaries between the world of good and the world of evil, like in at least certain interpretations of the Lord of the Rings and even the Lord of the Rings itself,

little bit is much more black and white than this. But let's dive in because the story behind the Game of Thrones pilot is, I would argue, more dramatic than the first episode itself, not more dramatic than the show as a whole. No one is beheaded, although they nearly were. So the question, Lizzie, how did a couple of lowly Hollywood squires and an outsider king create the most impactful show since the Sopranos, arguably, and what went wrong? Before we dive in the details, Game of Thrones is an American fantasy drama television series created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. It is an adaptation of George R.R. Martin's fantasy novels. The series is called A Song of Ice and Fire. The first novel is called A Game of Thrones. It premiered on HBO on April 17, 2011, just before Lizzie and I were shoved out of the birth canal of our respective institutions. And we took it. took ownership of Game of Thrones and ran into the world and said, we're adults, even though we weren't. It ran for eight seasons, and today, as I mentioned, we were just discussing the pilot, which was directed by Timothy Van Patten.

More on that in a moment. It stars Sean Bean as Ned Stark, Michelle Fairley as Catlin Stark, Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lanister, Nicolae Costa Waldow as Jamie Lanister, Wiena Hidi as Queen Ceres, Harry Lloyd as Prince Viceris Targary, Amelia Clark as DeNaris or Danny Targaryen. Jason Mamoa as Caldrogo. Mark Addy as King Robert Barathean. Kit Harrington as John Snow. Sophie Turner as Sansa Stark.

Isaac Hempstead Wright as Brand Stark. Richard Madden as Rob Stark and many, many, many, many, many, many, many more. So many, Starks. So many Starks and everybody and more will be introduced over the following episodes. As always, the IMDB logline reads, Lord Eddard Stark is concerned by the news of a disaster. from the Knights Watch. King Robert Barathian and the Lannisters arrive at Winterville.

The exiled Prince Vassaris Targarian forges a powerful new alliance. Multiple storylines handled quite well, as you mentioned, Lizzie, relatively easy to follow. That was not always the case, as we will learn. I'm sure. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon by James Hibbard,

George R.R. Martin's wonderful website and blog, Vanity Fair's Game of Thrones showrunners get extremely candid about their original piece-of-ship-ship pilot and many articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the show. Now, Lizzie, our story begins not with a high-born lord or lady, nor an exalted knight. It doesn't even start in a really cool spot like King's Landing

or some other city of World Leoport. Instead, let us venture into the humble land known as New Jersey. Oh, the Erie. The Erie. Sure, the Erie. On the 20th of September, of the year of 1,948, a young boy named George Single R. Martin was born in Bayonne. Single R. Single R.

Biggest plot twist so far. Keep going. A city with a rich history of shipbuilding and manufacturing. He was the eldest of three. He had two younger sisters. His father, Raymond, that's where the single R comes from, was a longshoreman. and his mother, a fair maiden, eventually worked in a lingerie factory, aptly named Maiden Form.

Oh, yeah, those are nice bras. Yes, George's beginnings were inauspicious. There was no car, no carriage. They lived in low-income housing, spitting distance from a king's landing of sorts, Manhattan, but George's world was small. It extended from their apartment on 1st Street to his school on 5th Street.

But every day, he walked past a reminder that once upon a time, Lizzie, his family had been important. His mother was of Irish descent. She was a Brady. A Brady. I'll take that again for our Irish listeners. I apologize.

He grew up hearing about his mother's heritage and the power of the Brady's. Their import to my own history. To get to school, he had to walk past the house where his mother had been born. Here's the quote. I've looked back on that, of course, and in some of my stories,

there's a sense of a lost golden age where there were wonders and marvels, undreamed of. Somehow what my mother told me set all of that stuff into my imagination. And Lizzie, young George single R. Martin, had quite the imagination. He was not allowed to own a cat or a dog, so instead he raised dime store turtles. Great. They weren't just turtles. They lived in a Marx medieval castle play set that he'd gotten for Christmas, and they became knights and kings and lords and ladies. And through his pets and his imagination, George's world grew and grew, and he began to write. And this is when, Lizzie, he decided to embellish his own

name. He added another R when he was 13, Richard, his cousin's name, as he went through Catholic confirmation. And George R.R. Martin was born. So he contributed to the school paper. He became its editor. He discovered comics. He turned out his own superhero stories. He submitted them to fanzines, and his earliest published writing was in the form of letters to comic book editors. And he was very astute. For example, he suggested that Avengers No. 9 was better than Fantastic 4 number 32 because Wonder Man dies in that story. He's a brand new character.

He's introduced and he dies. It was very heart-wrenching. I liked the character. He was a tragic, doomed character. I guess I've responded to tragic, doomed characters ever since I was a high school kid. Sound familiar? Oh, yeah. He loves to Lop Sop.

heads off. Well, if George R.R.R. Martin was going to rewrite the history of his house and lops some heads off in the process, he wasn't going to be able to do it from home. Now, Lizzie, in all good adventure stories, the hero has to leave home. Frodo has to leave the Shire. Of course. And at 18 years old, George R.R. Martin packed up his typewriter, and he headed west. Not to Hollywood. One does not simply walk into Mordor to steal from a different franchise. Instead, he stepped off that Greyhound at Northwestern University in Illinois. He was both literally and figuratively completely lost. It was the farthest he'd ever been from home. Quote, Chicago might as well have been Shanghai for all I cared. For me, it was a wild, exotic place. End quote. But George R. R.

Martin was plagued with doubts because he'd made a terrible mistake, Lizzie. He had looked up how much the average fiction writer earned. And the numbers were low. So he decided, since he had no king's ransom to fall back on, there was no gold at his castorly rock. He refused the call to adventure and decided to study journalism. He minored in history, but the myths beckoned, so he said, could I submit a paper in the form of historical fiction? He focused on the surrender of the Swedish fortress of Sviburg during the Finnish War of 1080, and it's hard not to see the power of destiny at play, because his professor liked it so much, he submitted it to the Scandinavian Review. And they rejected it. But they said, this is pretty good. You should keep writing. And George R.R. Martin did. He started to

develop more complex views. The Vietnam War challenged his belief that the United States was inherently right in any given conflict. He became a conscientious objector. And he sold his first short story when he was 22 years old. It was published in the February 1971 issue of Galaxy magazine. But Lizzie, the bills piled up. And writing could not make ends meet. So he's older than I think. thought. Sorry. So he's born in, what, 1948? 48. Whoa, he's a lot older than I thought. Okay. Oh, yes. So 22, he sells his first short story, and he takes on a bunch of odd jobs in order to make ends meet. So he's a communications coordinator for the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation.

He teaches journalism at Clark College in Iowa. He directs chess tournaments. But there were some important victories. In 1975, he won his first Hugo Award for Best Novella for a song for Leah, which was about the first big romance in his life. And there were some setbacks. He was divorced in 1979. He probably wrote a breakup song for Leah at that point. But in 1980, he became a full-time writer. He won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Sand Kings,

a novelette or a novella, and the Hugo Award for Short Story for the Way of the Cross and Dragon, which was about Catholicism in the far future. And in 1984, after a producer optioned one of his books, which never became a movie, George R.R. Martin made his way to Hollywood to learn firsthand, Lizzie, about the Game of Thrones in Hollywood.

Like the great houses of Westeros, the Hollywood studios were decades from their glamorous and deeply unethical highs of the studio system back in the 30s, and there were new threats from the East, the giants of consumer electronics, strange names like Sony and Matsushita Electric. But fortunately, for our hero, Hollywood is in the midst of a new golden age of what, Lizzie? What genre is percolating at the end of the 70s and early 1980s?

Uh, home video. Well, that's not a genre. Nope, just kidding. Television. Nope, 1970s. Gimm-uh. Science fiction. Science fiction.

I got it right on the first try. There you go. I didn't sleep last night. At the time, home video is really exploding. But science fiction is what we're going to focus on. Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back, Superman 2, Star Trek 2, the wrath of Khan, E.T. the extraterrestrial had surpassed the first Star Wars to become the highest grossing film of all time.

But as you mentioned, Lizzie, young George was outside the red keep of the silver strain in the somewhat less lustrous land of television. So in the mid-1980s, CBS rebooted what Rod Serling show? The Twilight Zone. The Twilight Zone. That's right. And George R.R.R. Martin penned the 24th episode of the first season. It was an adaptation of Rogers Alasney's classic short story, The Last Defendant, of Camelot, which feels a lot like Highlander to me. It's basically about an immortal modern-day Sir Lancelot who guides this newly awoken Merlin through the 20th century. And just the idea of immortality, modern-day Arthurian legend feels like Highlander. I could not find any official connections to Highlander. If anybody out there knows if there is any connection to Highlander,

you know too much about Highlander. All right. Now, this suited George just fine. There were knights, there was magic, there was a battle on an otherworldly version of Stonehenge. There were supposed to be horses, but those in power, Lizzie felt that his script was too expensive. Martin had to choose Stonehenge or horses, not both. It was his first clash with the Kings, and it would not be his last. He chose Stonehenge. You got to. The crew built the set, and Martin was amazed.

This incredible team of carpenters, painters, and designers brought forth into existence. something that had only existed in his mind. He had spent years in a room just typing and writing by himself, sharpening his mind against the wet stone of books, and suddenly he sees collaboration. This is cool. Also, just like the pleasant feeling of camaraderie. He says it was almost exhilarating to go into an office where there were other people. Yeah, you're not by yourself. Yeah, to have a cup of coffee, to talk about stories or development in writers' meetings. I couldn't agree more. I think one of the downsides of the move to work from home, although I can appreciate how it has liberated many people to work who weren't previously able to, is a lack of camaraderie. I miss

that feeling of conversation sparking up as we avoid doing our actual jobs together. Okay. So he works on several more episodes of Twilight Zone. He graduates to another CBS series, Beauty and the Beast. Oh, I have never seen this adaptation. Have you seen this, Lizzie? This is the one with Linda Hamilton, right? That's right. Oh, I've seen some. Assistant District Attorney Catherine Chandler, the beauty in this instance, and Ron Perlman as Vincent the Beast. Love me a Ron Pearlman in any sort of makeup. Again, Martin finds himself at odds with the lords above him. They are adamant. The Beast has to be completely likable. He cannot kill anybody. You know what? We shouldn't even see any blood on screen. And Martin thinks this is ridiculous. And he realizes that the thrill of writing television

comes with an unexpected cost. Compromise. He was worn down by battles over censorship, sexuality, violence, even whether or not a scene was, quote, politically charged. It seems like the Lodestar for the Lords of Television was very simple. Don't offend anybody.

And Martin said, fuck that. So in 1991, his schedule opened up and he decided to write something completely new, a brand new novel called Avalon, which was going to take place in space. Now, he hadn't quit Hollywood. He was waiting here back on a couple of scripts.

He sits down to start working on Avalon when, quote, suddenly it just came to me. This scene from what would ultimately be the first chapter of a Game of Thrones. It's from Brand's viewpoint, they see a man beheaded, and they find some dire wolf pups in the snow. It just came to me so strongly and vividly

that I knew I had to write it. I sat down to write it, and in like three days it just came right out of me, almost in the form you've read. Wow. More or less, these scenes play out as written in the pilot. At first, he thinks maybe it's a short story. But after he wrote that first chapter, I knew what the second chapter would be.

And pretty soon, the science fiction novel was forgotten. Now, the first chapter may have come straight from God, but the wall came straight from something man-made. Lizzie, any guesses as to what piece of historical architecture may have inspired the wall, which is the giant ice wall that separates the north, from the unexplored area of the wildlings and the whitewalkers. The Berlin Wall?

Not the Berlin Wall, a much more ancient wall. Oh, the Great Wall of China? Hadrian's Wall. Oh, of course. The other wall. That's right. So Martin in 1981 visited a friend in England, and as we approached the border of England and Scotland, we stopped to see Hadrian's wall.

I stood up there and I tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman legionary standing on this wall, looking at these distant hills. It was a very profound feeling. For the Romans at the time, this was the end of civilization. It was the end of the world. We know that there were Scotsby on the hills, but they didn't know that. It could have been any kind of monster. It was the sense of fantasy. Everything is bigger and more colorful. So I took the wall and made it three times as long and 700 feet high and made it out of ice. Pretty compelling imagery. Very. Can you briefly explain for anyone who doesn't know what Hadrian's wall was? I will do my best. Hadrian's wall built 1900 years ago or so, the reign of Emperor Hadrian, hence the name.

Basically, fortification at the northern end of Roman Britain at that point in time extends nearly from the Irish Sea to the North Sea. I think it gets almost all the way there. And it was designed to stop Raiders from the north, much like the wall in George R. Martin's story. It doesn't actually separate, I don't think it, it doesn't separate Scotland from England. It's in northern England. And I think that at its highest, it was, I don't know, 15 or 20 feet tall, certainly nowhere near the 700 feet that George R.R. Martin had in his imagination.

But as we know with George R.R. Martin thinks to start small, get big. This chapter on brand becomes a short story. A short story becomes a novel, and very quickly a novel becomes a trilogy. So by the year 2000, Martin's published nearly 2,000 pages of this series that is called A Song of Ice and Fire. A Game of Thrones, which is published in 1996, a Clash of Kings, 1998, and a storm of swords, noticing a trend in the year 2000. He drew inspiration from The Wars of the Roses, from J.R.R. Tolkien, from Jack Vance, Fritz Lieber, Robert E. Howard, also writers of historical fiction, Thomas B. Custain, Nigel Tranter, Maurice Druin, Sharon K. Penman, Bernard Cronwell.

And his goal, which sounds very similar to a science fiction writer I really like, Gene Wolfe, was to all. almost write a historical novel about history that never happened. So he specifically felt that historical fiction set during the Middle Ages had an excitement to it and a grittiness and a realness to it that fantasy novels lacked, even when they were supposedly set during a quasi-medieval period. Agree. And Lizzie, you mentioned this with the pilot, the dirt, the grime, the mud on the hem of the skirt. Candidly, like, the way that oftentimes the sex workers, like their hair and, you know, they look like they're a little dirty and grimy. Like, this is how people would look

and they're not showering every single day and they're not coming directly from hair and makeup, too set. So this was very important to Martin. And it's perhaps for that reason that Lizzie originally, there were no, what element would you guess,

was not in the original approach to these books? What high fantasy element? Dragons? Dragons. There were originally no dragons. He went back and forth until his friend writer Phyllis Eisenstein said, George, it's a fantasy.

You've got to put in the dragons. He did, and he dedicated the third book to her. The popularity of the books grows with each installment, and after a Clash of Kings has released, Martin says publicly, he feels that the size of the books would preclude it or at least make it

very difficult to do as a film. So if you remember, Lizzie, this is around the time that Lord of the Rings is being shot, which is being shot as a trilogy, one movie per book. But as Martin explains, the Lord of the Rings trilogy

runs roughly as many pages as one of his books. So it would take nine movies by Martin's estimation to cover the three books written, let alone the three that he had planned. And Martin had put in a lot of years in the blacksmith's forge of the writers' rooms of Hollywood. And be it features or television, one thing always remained true. His stories were too big. They were always too expensive. Yeah, this is smart. I mean, he's right. Like, honestly, there's nothing worse than when you you try to jam way too much into either a movie or a TV episode. We just talked about Avatar on Patreon at the end of the year. That was an example of trying to do, I think, both way too much and in the end by

default doing way too little. And it takes a lot of self-awareness to be able to just say, like, I'm sorry, you cannot tell this story in two and a half hours. Martin was, I think, pretty self-aware. He knew, you know what? My imagination, it makes me a novelist, not a screenwriter. So in 2005, the fourth book in the series was released, A Feast for Crows. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. This was a big deal. Fantasy novels rarely topped this list. A critic for Time magazine called him the American Tolkien,

and the great houses of Hollywood perked up. They said, money? Money? Martin's agent sent a song of ice and fire around Hollywood, and everyone said, TLDR, but here's an offer. Martin didn't like any of the offers that came in, because they were all from his perspective some form of compromise. Here are a couple of examples. Quotes from Martin.

John Snow is the central character. We'll focus on him and cut the rest of way. You know nothing, John Snow. That's not going to cut it. No. The next one. We're not going to cut anything. We'll keep all of it.

But we'll just make the first film and then make more if it's a big hit. And then Martin says, well, what if it's not a big hit? You're saying it's going to be Lord of the Rings. But what if it's more like Philip Pullman's the Golden Compass? You make one movie at bombs and then you have a broken thing. He's exactly right. Right. It's all or nothing. Which, by the way, I will always be sad that they have never successfully, really successfully, I think, adapted the His Dark Materials series into a film trilogy anyway, continue.

They did do the show on HBO. That's true, which I did really enjoy the show quite a lot. Yes. Well, I think part of the issue is that Martin is a king in the literary world, but he lacks a proper champion in Hollywood. So there's an very obscure saying, and I'll explain it to you. If you can't get a knight, get a cell sword. If you can't get a sell sword, get a squire. If you can't get a squire, get a page. And if you can't get a page, get a 35-year-old novelist and screenwriter

who's never worked in television before. So right around the time that Martin was declining what he perceived to be an invitation to the Red Wedding, David Beniof was 200 pages into a Game of Thrones, and he was completely blown away. The moment, as you mentioned, Lizzie, that concludes the pilot, when Bran was pushed out of the tower window, Beniof was in love.

He knew, I have to adapt this. And it's not a movie. It's a television show. So he calls up his writing partner, 34-year-old Daniel Brett Weiss or DB Weiss. Now, Weiss had fewer credits than Benioff, but they'd been hired together to write an adaptation of Orson Scott Card's Ender's game

for Wolfgang Peterson. It wasn't used, but it didn't matter because David Beniof told him, I think this could be the greatest series of all time. So Weiss picks up the first book and he doesn't stop reading for two days. I sat there in my chair and I didn't move. My now-wife, then-girlfriend, was wondering why I wasn't moving and like I wasn't bathing.

I was, you know, I was eating and going to the bathroom. That was it. And I read 900 pages in two days, which I hadn't done probably since I was 12 years old. Now, both of these men were obsessed with Tolkien. They played Dungeons and Dragons growing up. So they come up with this intricate, complicated plan. They just reach out to George R.R. Martin, and then they invite him to lunch at the Palms in Los Angeles. which is just an incredible move.

Martin is, I believe, basically 20 years their senior. He's a New York Times bestselling author. New York Times bestselling author behind one of probably the most popular, you know, contemporary fantasy outside of maybe the wheel of time or something like that. He has a 10-year career in television. These guys have a couple of feature film credits to their name. I think much has been made of they'd done nothing. David Benioff had written the 25th hour at this point, for example.

both as a novel and he did the screenplay for Spike Lee. That's a great movie. Yeah. So they weren't no one, but they were no one in television. But to their surprise, Martin accepts. So they go to lunch, and according to Weiss, Martin tells them the apocryphal Stonehenge versus horses story from his time working in television. You know, my imagination is bigger than the horses in Stonehenge.

I want Stonehenge and the horses and another 20 Stonehenge's and another million horses. End quote. So Baniath and Weiss play it exactly right. And I think they're being honest about what they intend to do. They don't want to change the books. They just want to put them on television. So Martin says, okay, but why you? I mean, I have more experience in television than you guys do.

And I think they basically said, we love it. And Martin realized he's busy. Martin's working on the next novels. So these guys could go and do the show. They seem to worship his material. so they'll be good stewards for it. So he gives them some demands. Martin says, I want to be a producer.

I also get to write some of the scripts. You have to do one season per book, and you cannot cut out the sex and the violence. And Beniov and Wyss say, no problem. Great. Those are our favorite parts. Can you keep pushing kids out windows? We love it.

So Martin ends the meeting with a test. He was sitting there, kind of looking between the two of us, and he said, who was John Snow's mother? Do you know the answer to this question, Lizzie? Spoilers! Spoilers! Spoilers! Spoilers! Before Lizzie guesses. Spoiler alert.

Okay, go ahead. God, I used to know this. Isn't it Ned Stark's sister? Yes. Leanna Stark. Very good. This had not been revealed in the books up until this point, but there were theories that this was the case.

If you were a close reader and you followed the message boards, etc. You would probably know. Baniath and Weiss had read each book twice. They take a shot in the dark. They get the question right. They pass Martin's text. You have my blessing, boys. Now they have to go sell this show. All right, quick background on Beniof and Weiss and their credits up until this point, just so you guys have an understanding of what

they're armed with as they go into this meeting. So they've never worked in television. They met in grad school at Trinity College in Dublin. Wice takes the path of a squire. He works as a PA on the Viking sagas and as a personal assistant to Glenn Frey of the Eagles. Interesting turn. Okay. Beniof thought maybe he joined the order of Maesters. until he realized that nobody, but you will ever read or care about your thesis, so he left academia. They come back to the U.S., they co-write a script about a boarding school where the headmaster was Satan. Sounds fun, but nothing comes of it. Benioff writes a novel, the 25th hour.

Spike Lee turns it into a movie. Benioff writes the script. Weiss writes a novel called Lucky Wanderboy. He works on an adaptation of Halo. Nothing comes of that. And now these two, again, with some feature film experience, but no television experience, are coming together to pitch arguably the most ambitious television show in the history of television shows. Politics, sex, nudity, violence, incest, rape, slavery, dragons, castration.

It's got it all. You know, something for everybody in the family. It's got it all, kids, your grandma will love it. Okay, Lizzie, let's be honest. There's only one house in all seven kingdoms of Hollywood that could possibly pull this off. Yes. Which one? HBO.

The Home Box Off. The boob box office. Which was not exactly known for fantasy at this time. No, but they are known for boobs. I should change my joke to be the home boob office because that is what they did best. Boobes for your home and your office. Whether the 2000s marked the beginning of the second or the third golden age of television is widely debated by scholars far and wide.

But what is agreed is that this renaissance was started by the home boob office as it were. Sex in the City, the Sopranos, the Wire, six feet under, Deadwood, even entourage, I'm loathes to say, showcased a quantum leap forward and aesthetic quality and the craftsmanship of storytelling. And the one show that HBO had in the same realm as Game of Thrones was, we actually discussed this show before Lizzie, Rome. Oh, hey, I loved Rome. It was co-produced by HBO and the BBC. It was very well received, and it was extremely expensive. The first season cost reported $100 million. I couldn't get official numbers on the total cost of the first season of the Sopranos, but I believe Rome was three times as expensive conservatively. Did you watch Rome?

I never watched Rome. Okay, that does not surprise me at all, that that cost that much money. Rome looked incredible. I thought you were going to say that you never watched Rome. No, no. It was really good. It was good. At least the first like one or two seasons were really good. Yeah, I've heard it's great. But it looks incredible. It makes a lot of sense that that's a direct precursor to Game of Thrones. It's also unbelievably violent. Yes. Look, despite the success of Rome, HBO's president of programming, Carolyn Strauss was not a fan of the genre.

And she was known, Lizzie, to never reveal anything during a pitch. We will call her Lady Stone Face. Because they were told, that's very rude. Carolyn Strouds sounds wonderful. This is for storytelling purposes only. They were told she wouldn't smile. She wouldn't laugh. Be prepared and beware.

So in March of 2006, Ben Aff and Weiss go into the pitch and they are nervous. Now, I do want to mention that in most pitches, you go in with a take. What's your take? What's your angle on the material? I've done this myself before, not frequently quite very successfully, but a take is key. And Martin was always frustrated by the takes. He didn't want somebody's take. He just wanted them to translate the story to the screen.

Right. Just put the books on screen. Your take. I have the take. The take is my book. Right. You take that and you put it on the screen. That's your take.

So presumably, HBO wants to hear Beniof and Weiss's take. But their take is, we don't have a take. Their take is the book is the take. Their take is don't fuck with the books, yeah. They just want to tell the story of the books. So they just tell the story. They walk Strauss through the pilot. Beniof takes a scene.

Weiss takes a scene. And then after the pilot's over, they give a really intentionally vague overview of everything else. You know, yada yada dragons, Kalee, Lucey, little finger, bang, bang, boom, Ned gets headslice off. Now, again, they did point out, Ned would be beheaded because he's arguably the protagonist at the end of the first season, and that there would be dragons, because those are important. But they didn't want to get bogged down in the lore, which is obviously very smart. And some sources claim they had a very good comp, and I do think this is a very good comp.

It's the Lord of the Rings meets the Sopranos. Yeah, perfect. It's exactly right. Great. HBO locked in at the exact moment that Benioff had. Gina Ballion, an exec in the meeting, was shocked. My mouth was gaping open. The kid was pushed out a window? If this were a script, it would be at this exact moment that Strauss broke her own rule and laughed.

It wasn't. But they said that she did chuckle at some point during the pitch. Did she chuckle at the kid getting shoved out the window? No, it's one of the Lannisters were having incest sex. Yeah. Hilarious. For Beniov and Weiss, this was an enormous victory. And little did they know they had just joined the Game of Thrones of Hollywood.

Now, a quick note as we move forward, because I could not find an exact date on this. At some point after acquiring the rights to the books, HBO ditches the more cumbersome, a song of ice and fire to go with Game of Thrones, a shortened version of the title of the first book. Martin publicly has said he thinks it's simply because Game of Thrones test, did better. I just think it's a better title for a television show, and it perfectly captures the political intrigue that the show is going to set up. Exactly. Months of negotiation between Martin and HBO follow squabbles over merchandising rights and scripts and scraps. And then in March of 2008, Carolyn Strauss gets beheaded. Figuratively. Okay, that's a bit extreme. She steps down. She stays on

the project as an executive producer, but HBO undergoes our favorite thing, Lizzie, a regime change. Uh-oh. Which, if your project has not already been shot, is bad news most of the time. Benny Off and Weiss would have to sell the show again to the new head of programming, Michael Lombardo. And Lombardo was skeptical. HBO was known as the land of the big budgets, but they didn't have Lord of the Rings money. And HBO was losing ground on the battlefield of prestige TV. They had somewhat infamously passed on two breakout AMC television shows.

Any guesses, Lizzie? Mad Men and The Walking Dead. No one cares about The Walking Dead. Mad Men and Breaking Bad. People do care about the Walking Dead. Many people care about it. Not me. In the fall of 2008, Lombardo spots D.B. Weiss in that legendary training ground of Hollywood

champions, Equinox, and he sees Weiss on a stationary bike reading a copy of the first book, A Game of Thrones. The pages are dog-eared and marked up with pen and highlighter. And maybe it was seeing Weiss's commitment. Maybe it was the fear of madmen happening all over again. Maybe it was the eucalyptus spray in the air. God, those towels are nice. The towels, I've never been, but I've heard they're nice.

They're nice. But that fall, HBO Greenlit Game of Thrones with a budget of $10 million for the pilot. It was roughly as expensive as the pilot for Lost, one of the most expensive pilots ever made. It would also be the first episode of television that Benioff and Weiss ever made. That's crazy.

Gina Ballion said she ran back to Lombardo and said, just double, double, double checking, we're killing the lead, and there's drag. Correct. On November 11, 2008, it was official, as the Hollywood reporter put it, HBO has given a pilot order to the Fantasy Project Game of Thrones. So Benny Evin Weiss were riding into battle

with about as much experience as you or me, and they knew they needed help. So they brought in director Tom McCarthy. Oh. Lizzie, are you familiar with Tom? McCarthy. Yes. It's going to kill me that I can't remember his films right now, but recognizable name for sure. I think he's most known now for Spotlight. Yes. Okay. Sorry. Yes. Oscar winning film, wonderful director. I think most successfully, though, an independent film director or a

smaller dramatic director. So he is at this point fresh off of 2003's The Station Agent. Oh. Which I'm not sure if you've seen. Peter Dinklage. Yes. And 2007's The Visitor. I have not seen that one. Oh, I love The Visitor. It's really good. It's kind of post-9-11 immigration story with Richard Jenkins. I have seen that, sorry. Which I really, really liked. Ends with him playing the drums in the subway.

It's a good movie. All right, Beniof Weiss, McCarthy, and Martin, team up with casting directors Nina Gold and Robert Stern to find actors who can bring these characters to life for a price. So, Lizzie, you mentioned the wonderful ensemble of somewhat unrecognizable faces. That was intentional, perhaps less for creative reasons, but because these sets, costumes, and CGI were going to be expensive. Yeah.

So let's put some cheapo people inside of it with them. Great. So they sift through tape after tape after tape, mostly English actors. But there were a couple of bigger names that they pursued right away. Lizzie, there are two people that were targeted from the get-go. If you had to guess, which two would you put your money on? People who wound up in the actual pilot. Yes.

They were cast and they were approached right away. Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage. You are the champion, five stars, all the points to Gryffindor. Thank you. Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, despite the fact that he's American. And Sean Bean as Ned Stark, despite the fact that he played Boromere in a competing fantasy epic, Lord of the Rings, although it had been a few years. And he died off at the end of the first one.

Well, I also think that's actually really smart casting because he kind of immediately puts you in the world, because you're familiar with him in a world like this, but it also keeps you on your toes because he is not the pure Edard Stark as Boramir as he is in this. So that's kind of brilliant casting, I think. He arguably plays the most Martin-esque character in that adaptation of Lord of the Rings because Boromir is given a level of complexity

that I think many of the other characters, at least in the first film, are not. Also, Sean Bean frequently played villains, so it's interesting to bring him in. We talked about that. Yeah. Patriot Games, in the day, absolutely.

006 in Golden Eye. Now, Sean Bean was in, neither of them auditioned, and Dinklage took some convincing. As you mentioned, Lizzie, he and McCarthy had worked together on the station agent, and Dinklage knew Benioff through Amanda Pete. No, Benioff's wife. They were friends.

His first reaction was, this is a fantasy movie, and he said, Hard Pass, friend, there's dragons and big speeches, and there's nothing to hold on to. And if somebody my size, it's fucking death. the opposite of the activism I was involved with. But then he agreed to read the script, and it completely changed his mind.

But he had a rule. No beard. I just didn't want a long beard and a dwarf in the Lord of the Rings way. And they said, no problem. How about a terrible haircut? It's not the, I mean, the cut is bad. It's the frosted tips that really...

It's the tips. They just dipped them in Nevada bleach just really quickly. So Dinklage actually encouraged Lena Heady to audition for Ceres. She's so good. She's great. She's kind of the secret sauce, I think, of this thing. So Jason Momoa had the opposite reaction of Dinklage. I was born to play this role. I've never gone out for something before where I was like, no one is going to take this from me. I just remember giving it all and leaving going,

good luck finding someone who's going to play Drogo. I mean, truly, if he walks in the room, there's no question. Yeah. Well, he apparently gave an impromptu Haka performance in the audition because Drogo had very few lines. Yeah. And he's so, like, powerful. and imposing, I just, I think that would have been so cool. Yeah. I mean, obviously, there's the physicality and, you know, he's very handsome. He's physically gigantic, but he moves so beautifully. And like, he moves very beautifully. He also has very expressive eyes. Yes. And I think that's really important, especially given his lack of dialogue. Yeah. So oftentimes one actor would read for a part, and then they'd lose out on it, but then they'd get brought in for a different part. So a couple of examples

that a little bit tie into the pilot. So Conleth Hill read for Robert Baratheon, loses it to Mark Addie comes back in episode three as Lizzie. God, what is his name? He's bald. He's the spider. Lord Verris. I knew it. The spider.

My brain's working good. Your favorite spider as opposed to Avatar. Now, similarly, Yonreon auditioned for John Snow, lost it to Kit Harrington, and then came back in season three as Ramsey Bolton. And Kit Harrington, Lizzie, arrived at the audition fresh from battle with a black eye at all. Oh. He probably left out the fact that he'd actually lost because the night before he got into a fight with a guy at McDonald's who was harassing his date. I called him up for a fight, which I'd never done before. And of course, he'd been sat down the whole time, so he got up and

he just kept going. I realized that I had to at that point throw the first punch, otherwise I looked like a complete wimp, and I got battered. So I do like gets his ass kicked, wins the role of John Snow. Great. The hardest part of casting was the kids. This is mature subject matter. It's an enormous undertaking. The kids are going to grow up with the characters and the show. This is a multi-year commitment, both from the kids and from the show.

So, Maisie Williams was 12 when she auditioned, and she almost skipped the audition to go on a school field trip to a pig farm. She said, Mom, you think we could just miss this one and go to the pig farm instead? And her mom said, let's not, the residuals could be big. She was right. I added that last part. Sophie Turner said, I didn't know HBO, I didn't know Game of Thrones, I didn't know George R.R. Martin. I barely knew what TV was. But the casting team was going from school to school in London, and her drama teacher convinced her to audition. She basically just threw a bunch of the girls from the class into these auditions together. Sovi Turner was 13, going through this audition process, and she kept getting the name wrong. She kept telling people that she was going out for a new show called The Three Kings, which everybody thought, what are you going out for? At first she didn't even

really take it very seriously. She'd only done one audition before. She hadn't gotten the part. And her teacher basically said, look, none of you are probably going to get this, but it's going to be a good experience. Yeah. She didn't tell her parents about it. Her mom finally learned about the audition when she got a call from Nina Gold telling her that her daughter was one of seven finalists. And her mom says, for what? Oh my God. So then she learns she's in the final seven and she becomes determined to get this job. She would tell her mom's things like, you know, if I don't get, very 13 year old things. If I don't get a very 13 year old things. If I don't get the this job. I'm never going back to school. It's going to crush me. And she learned that she got the role

one morning when her mom woke her up by saying, good morning sunset. Aw. Which is pretty good. Isaac Hempstead Wright was just 10 years old when he auditioned. And again, it was an accident. There was a local drama group in his town. And there was an open casting call for Game of Thrones. It was too cold to go play football outside. So he decides, ah, I'll just go on an audition. Then he gets a callback and he keeps forgetting about it. And then say, come do the pilot. He does the pilot. And he keeps forgetting about it. And then eventually it just becomes his life for the rest. of his life. And he becomes incredibly famous. Just kind of a total lark. And I do think one of the reasons the pilot really works is the kids are acting like kids. They're very unassuming. They're

playful. They're mischievous. They don't understand the consequences of what is happening. Yes. Which also really helps set up that twist of, oh, I'm just going to kill this kid. Well, not kill him in the end, but by shoving him out of a window. Yeah. There's a scene between Catlin and Sonsa where, you know, Sonsa has learned that it sounds like their houses are going to merge because she's going to marry Joffrey and her father's going to become the hand at the king. And she's so excited about Joffrey and just has zero concept of what this actually means in terms of a marriage. I mean, she's 13. Also, as we later learned, Joffrey is an absolute demon. But it's so, it's just so well done. It's so believable. She's really good. And yeah,

these are not Hollywood kids. And that is smart. I agree. So it seems like they've got this great cast and great crew in place, and they make their way to Scotland. Shooting begins on October 24, 2009. They're going to shoot for 26 days. Most of it's going to take place in Northern Ireland, but they'd also shoot in Morocco. At first, it seems like the shoot is going really, really well. And Benioff later says that's because they had no idea what they were doing.

When the costumes for the White Walkers weren't ready in time for shooting, they just put the actors in green suits and they said, we'll CGI it later. Oh, dear. What they didn't know is it. If they did that, it would cost half the budget of the pilot. Turns out the rest of the costumes didn't look much better. For the reason that you pointed out earlier, Lizzie,

it looked like they had been made the day before. They didn't look lived him. And they really hadn't figured out the hair. Kit Harrington, John Snow, didn't have a beard. He was very baby-faced and he had a bad wig. Okay, is that why they have the shaving scene in this? That's exactly why they have the shaving scene in this. I was going to say, because it's completely unnecessary,

except all of a sudden they're all clean-shaven by the dinner. Okay. Yep. That dinner scene, some shots from that dinner scene, obviously Catlin's reshot, we'll get to her in a second, but are from the original pilot. Harry Lloyd, Vesaris Targaryen, wears a titanium and silver wig, like he does in the final erred version. But Lizzie, it was a short bob. Oh, my God, I want to see it.

I know. Apparently the issue was they couldn't figure out how to differentiate it from both Draco-Malfoy and Legolas. And so they were just stuck in this like, is he this? Is he this? You're going to wind up looking like Jeff Daniels and dumb and dumber. Don't do that. Yeah.

Circe's original look, as described by Lena Heddy, was medieval Dolly Parton. She actually liked it. She said, I loved it. My hair devolved. And Jack Gleeson, who plays Geoffrey Brathian, had a page boy cut that made him more likable, which was obviously not what the showrunners were going for. It seems like, again, the grit was missing. And the other problem, Lizzie, is that some of the...

folks involved don't seem to understand the rules of the world that they are crafting. So producer Brian Cogman, who was then Benioff's assistant and a big fan of the books, he later became a co-executive producer on the show, said, quote, when we first shot the scene where the Starks find the Dairwolds, the wonder of what a Dairwolf was wasn't coming across. It didn't seem important enough to the characters. And I'm little assistant Brian running around the set, yelling to anyone who would listen, these are Dyerwolves. No one has seen these in a million years. It's like seeing dinosaurs, not like finding puppies. That actually still doesn't really work in the final.

It still doesn't really register. The only clue that you get that it's weird is when Ned is talking to Uncle Benjin, when he says, you know, they haven't seen a dire wolf south of the wall in X-years. And it's like, oh, didn't get that. Yes. Now, King Robert Barathian's arrival didn't go much better. Mark Addy said that when he gets off his horse, nobody kneels, which is what you're supposed to do in front of the king.

Nicolai Coaster Waldo later said, nobody knew what they were doing or what the hell this was. There certainly was not a sense that this was going to be some game changer for anyone. But we had a lot of fun. They used Dun Castle in Scotland as Winterfell. And Lizzie, they kind of only shot Winterfell. They cut everything from Kings Landing from the pilot to save money,

which drew a lot of attention to this castle because it's a very recognizable tourist location. And so there were concerns, Is everybody going to just think we don't have the money to actually shoot, you know, a big HBO-style epic? Sorry, am I wrong? Is there no Kings Landing in the pilot? There is. There was not in the original pilot.

Okay. And then things got a lot worse in Morocco. So in Morocco, they had access to sets originally built for Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, which looked great. George R. Martin wrote on his website, one small portion of the Jerusalem set, redressed and repainted, became the courtyard of Valerio's Manz, where Danny first meets Caldrogo. That was the scene they were filming when Ty and I arrived, and it looked gorgeous.

And this is where everything kind of comes to a head. George R.R. Martin was there on set because he had flown in to make a cameo as a Pentoshi nobleman at DeNaris's wedding. And D.B. Y says, that's when you started to feel the wheels coming off. The wedding was shot at night. As Ian Glenn, who plays Jora Morton later said, since the wedding was shot at night, quite a lot of money had been spent on seeing absolutely fuck all.

In the story, Cal gives DeNaris a horse as a wedding gift, so they'd flown in a silver filly. And according to Martin, one of the best stunt riders in Europe, who would double for Tamsin Merchant, who was then playing DeNaris. More on that in a moment.

In the book, DeNaris starts to ride away on the horse, so you think she's fleeing, she turns back, and she and the horse jump over a campfire. This was supposed to be this big turning, point, right? Because it's going to appeal to call and it's them coming together and it shows her kind of independence a little bit and that she's a capable person. They try and try and try and try. And this horse will not jump over the campfire. I don't blame it. It would veer left. It would veer right. It would

stop dead in its tracks. Finally, Tom McCarthy says, put the fire out. We will add it in later in CGI. The horse won't jump over the doused fire. Later, They're shooting the scene where Carl and Dineris consummate their marriage, and they learned that this Philly was actually a cult because he became visibly excited during this scene. Oh. Now, I do want to point out, according to Martin, in both the book and in this version of the pilot,

the wedding night scene is not a rape between Caldrogo and Deneas, but a seduction, which does change. It is very much a rape in the filmed pilot. That is the one thing I always remain feeling weird about because of where their relationship goes over the course of the marriage. And I got to say, the leering misogyny of the first episode, especially as it relates to DeNaris, is a tough watch, in my opinion. And her arc is wonderful across the first season,

and the nudity she does at the end of the season when, you know, she's rebirthed by fire is wonderful. But I think that some of it in this first episode just feels very male-gazy. HBO is going to want some boobs and boobs. butts in here. Let's do it. I just, I don't know, I feel like we linger on certain things. The way that her marriage to Caldrogo goes is different than the books. I understand it sets up a certain empowerment arc later on. But I feel like she is in particular done a bit of a disservice in this first episode that they do course correct as the show goes on. You know what? I know that that's a common

complaint about Game of Thrones and I'm not saying it's incorrect at all. And I know to me later on in the series, it gets honestly far worse than what I saw in the pilot in terms of of like they're showing you nips for the sake of showing you nips. Well, there's the scene with Little Finger and the two sex workers later on that became the kind of, I think, lightning rod later on in the season. But to me, it actually didn't bother me the way that they showed her in this. It was disturbing, but I felt like it was supposed to be disturbing. And, you know, it's interesting that she looks so, her face looks so little girly, very young, very sort of doll-like. And the fact that

it's her brother who is touching her inappropriately, it's not sexy. And if what was interesting to me is, you know, the other sequence between Lena Hidi and Nikolai Costa Waldo, neither of them are unclosed in any way. And they are having full on sex. So I think it's intentional the way that they expose De Nairis. And I don't think it's just because she has an amazing body. She does. But it didn't bother me because I felt like it was necessary to understand what she had been lip. And with prior to this marriage that she is now engaging in. And it was just enough ick where I didn't have to see, you know, it is implied that perhaps she and her brother have been engaging in sexual activities. We didn't have to see that. We saw just enough. It was like nipsedge, if you will.

And so I will disagree with you on that. I actually think that they handled her nudity pretty well in this. Man, I have such a different reaction because that scene, I'm just, we are lingering so long on that shot of her boobs as he is touching her nipple. And then we were just so long on that wide shot of her stepping into the water. But it's not hot. Like, I think it's interesting that that's what they focus on. I think you don't think it's hot. I think it's aimed that way for a lot of young men.

I don't agree. I don't think it matters. No, come on. I think I don't think it matters. I understand that's the out, but I don't think you need to show it in that way to, and I'm all for, show some nudity. I'm not against nudity. But I just don't feel that it is necessary.

It feels distracting to the story. story point, in my opinion. Fair enough. I felt like it was them making it very clear you are going to be uncomfortable over the course of this series. Or, you know, turned on in the case of Lena Hedy and Nikolai Coaster Walls out, because that's just the way the Lannister's role. Again, that's my biggest bump in the pilot is the representation of DeNaris's character in the pilot, across the board, from the nudity to the rape, et cetera. I just want to differentiate. For me, it's her beginning with Kyle Drogo and where it goes, it's not so much the way they represent her relationship with her brother. Sure, that's fair. I would say for me, it's a nudity in that scene,

and then I agree. It's the way they start with Kyle, it becomes difficult to follow that relationship emotionally as it progresses into something much more egalitarian and consensual. I do think she's so good in this role. I think they actually, I think they kind of pull it off unless you really think about it intellectually. Yes. And also Jason Moe is so good. Not a great place to start. It's a tough place to start. So in one interview, Weiss says there's one point when we watched our Dothraki wedding sets from the pilot being washed into the sea by a hurricane. To sum it all up, Benioff later said they had made every mistake possible, but they didn't know it yet. They didn't know it until they started to show the pilot to their closest allies. They hoped that they could

find people they trust to help them forge this story into something akin to Valerian steel. But instead, They got a lot of, it's good. You know that? It's good, Lizzie, where it's so high-pitched. It's good. It's good. That's the quote. It's bad.

Benioff said his brother-in-law and sister-in-law looked completely bored, but the worst screening, the notorious, mythical screening, was the screening for three of their writer friends. Scott Frank, Ted Griffin, and Craig Mason. I am sure you guys know at least one of those names, if not all three. Yes. Scott Frank, dead again, malice, get shorty, out of sight, Minority Report. Later, Logan, the Queen's Gambit, the currently doing very well, Department Q, Ted Griffin, Ravenous, Oceans 11, Matt Stickman, Craig Mason. Okay, at the time, Rocket

Man, Scary Movie 3 and 4, school for scoundrels, but later on, Dune Part 2, Chernobyl, the Last of Us. Benioff describes them watching the pilot as a, quote, deeply humiliating, painful experience. It wasn't working for any of them on a very basic level. Mazen apparently turned to them and said, point blank, you guys have a massive problem. And Benioff apparently just wrote on his legal pad in all caps, massive problem. Did he specify what it was? Well, that's when Mazin gave them a great note. He said, all you have to do is change everything.

Literally. Let's talk about the problems. So the biggest thing, it was not clear that Jamie and Searcy were siblings. Whoa, okay. Nobody knew that. So nobody knew why Jamie pushed Bran out of the tower at the end. So there was a startling lack of exposition across the pipeline. Banyov has said that's because he didn't like lines like, oh, sister, hello, my sister, my sister.

Agree. But if you don't give us any indication that they're siblings. You got to give a little bit. There was also then kind of a confusing amount of exposition in certain storylines. There was a flashback showing Ned's father and brother getting killed by the Mad King, but that kills pacing and created more confusion. Generally, it's very confusing. The pacing is off. Because it's confusing, you have no grasp of the dramatic stakes of the show.

and so therefore the surprises that come are not surprising because you lack the information to understand that they are surprises whatsoever. Nobody likes it, except for one person. George R. Martin thought it was pretty good. He's like, they didn't know. I knew they were brother and sister. This is great. I like the show a lot.

He liked the complexity. He was very supportive. HBO, not so much. And there were other problems. They say, why did we pay to have you shoot around the world when there are no wide shots in this pilot. Apparently, there were very few establishing shots or wide exteriors, so they said they could have shot the whole thing in Burbank or a car park or my backyard.

I love that. Just a close-up and you can see a styrofoam brick wall behind someone. That's right. Now, Michael Lombardo was not as harsh on it as Mazin and Griffin and Frank. He said, the pilot was okay. It wasn't great. The weakness was that the show needed more scope. It screams for scope. You need to feel the landscapes of the different kingdoms. Totally valid. I think the big problem is that a $10 million pilot from the network synonymous with great television cannot simply be okay. No. It has to be great.

So four months pass as Bonyov and Weiss are awaiting their fates. Are they going to beheaded? Are they going to let this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slip from their grasp? Or will they be given the chance to fix their mistakes and take it to series? Lombardo calls them in for a come-to-jutor-just-exam. moment with the producers. Like Martin back at the palm, he has a test. He just says point blank, do you think you nailed it?

And they say, we definitely didn't nail it. We definitely, we didn't nail it. And then Carolyn Strauss said there was a lot of begging and pleading. We probably said, we didn't nail it. We would really like to try again, please. Let us do it again. Let us please, please for the love of God. Let us do it again.

This is just what I would do in that situation. It seems like everybody agreed there was a show here. It's not that people saw it. and thought, oh, there's no show here. They think there's just a lot of mistakes in this pilot. The problem is, the only way that they are going to get the money to fix the pilot is to get a green light to go to series. Right.

So HBO's not now make, they've shot the pilot. This was the test film, right? There is not another $2 million decision to be made. Basically, this is saying, look, you gave us $10 million and we kind of fucked it. We kind of fucked it up. So we'd like a hundred. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a big ask. Everything comes down to this screening for HBO co-president Richard Plepler. He sits down and watches it, and I don't think Weiss was in the room because he said that somebody told him that Plepler stood up at the end and pumped his fist in the air in a good way. It's not that he thought the show was great yet, but he could see the show through the mistakes. So he said himself, you could see that some of the casting and the narrative was off. It needed to be fixed. It needed to be reshot.

But the overall emotional response was that you could feel how engaging it could be. So just as you could feel that there were a range of problems that needed to be addressed, you could equally feel that there was a magic there. So after sinking $10 million into this pilot, HBO gives the boys another chance. Which, by the way, like, got to say, that's a very good executive. Yes. It would be so easy to watch something that doesn't work and just say, throw it out, cut them off. If we're going to do this as a show, get an entirely different team.

this didn't work, they didn't nail it. And that's not the right answer here. Let's talk about that very briefly now, because much has been made of how is it that Benioff and Weiss, these two sharewreners with no experience, get this opportunity to make the show, and then they bungle it, and then they get an opportunity to fix the show. You know, Hollywood is notorious for never giving people second chances. Maybe at face value, that's a fair assessment of the situation. But I think the problem is we're coming at it from the wrong way, which is, to your point, Lizzie, give talented people second chances. Beniof and Weiss clearly went on to prove they were capable of helming and stewarding this show. Just because they got a second chance,

should be evidence you should give folks from all types of backgrounds second chances. Yes. I don't think our approach should be let's limit the opportunities across the board. It's let's raise everybody else up to get opportunities like this that have not been equally distributed. And further, you mentioned something, Lizzie, which is a question I had had. Why not just fire Ben off in Weiss and bring in new showrunners. And I do think, again, it speaks to when you partner with somebody that has a taker in this instance, you know, they are the stewards of this project. They have been personally selected by George R.R. Martin to bring this thing into existence, you kind of either need to give them a second chance or just pull the rip cord. It would be extremely difficult to then

go and find somebody else who Martin will approve of that they're going to bring in, who's going to digest the material in the same way that these guys have. So again, I think it was really just an all or nothing sort of approach at this point. So this was a really huge deal. On March 2nd, 2010, Variety announces that HBO has greenlit Game of Thrones, one of the costliest series in HBO's history. They ordered 10 episodes, including a reshoot of the pilot. As Benioff later said, this is insane. Plepler ordered a very expensive show set in a genre, alien to pay television from two guys who had never written or run a show before, and whose first attempts at writing and producing the Game of Thrones pilot had fallen well short of expectations.

And knowing all those things, he supported our show and took a serious, potentially ruinous risk in doing so because he believed in it. So the pressure is on. That original $10 million basically a dress rehearsal. They reshot 80 to 90% of the original pilot. Wow. I just want to say, though, like, you know,

the way that this has been reported, or at least the way I've always heard it, is like, they took a chance on us for, like, there was nothing there. And then, you know, we came in. It's like, there wasn't nothing. there. The only way that they said yes to this and spent this much money and ordered 10 episodes is that there was something there, that there was something that they clearly were doing right,

even if the whole thing was a total disaster on top of that, there was the seed of something in there that they nailed. There has to be. Otherwise, they don't give you this. They kill the show. Well, it's interesting. They actually made in a weird way. They made embarrassing mistakes, but they made the right mistakes. We can fix the wigs. We can fix the costumes. We can fix the lack of wide shots. What they couldn't fix is evidence of a lack of story in general. Exactly. Or an understanding of the world or the dynamics between the characters. Which, by the way, is really a testament to the books more than anything else. Yes. So it's not as if Ben Avin Weiss had created this in any way in whole cloth. So they rewrite the pilot. They add exposition. They lose the flashbacks.

They changed the intro, the opening scene. They basically stop trying to be so faithful to the book and more try to say, how do we translate the book to the screen? What's not just a direct one for one? What's the way in which we can make this story work for television in a way that is visual? And part of that, I think, is bringing in a more experienced television director. So Tom McCarthy left the project. I believe he had the opportunity to continue on and to helm the reshoot, but he said he just didn't feel connected to it. And ultimately, it's not a director's medium. It's a writer's medium. So they bring in Tim Van Patten. Van Patten, if you haven't seen his name and credits. I mean, the Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, he directed on Rome. And so they recast three

key roles. Lizzie, I'm sure you know at least one, but you know which of these roles. I know it's DeNaris. I believe it's also Catlin Stark. And then... That's right. I don't know the third one. It's Waymar Royce. He's one of the three Knights Watch in the first scene in the cold open. Hmm. Okay. But yeah, so Michelle Fairly replaces Jennifer Ely as Catlin Stark. I love Jennifer She's great. Basically, Jennifer really had just given birth recently, and I read she wanted to stay closer to home. Yeah. And then the creative one was Tamsin Merchant was replaced by Amelia Clark as DeNaris. And as Lombardo put it, her scenes with Jason Momoa just didn't work. There just wasn't the chemistry there that the studio felt that they needed. You know what? There's, and this is not like, you know, to talk about looks, this is not to talk about the attractiveness of either of them. Tams and Merchant is extremely delicate looking, both features and physicality. She looks breakable in a way that Amelia Clark does not. And I think Amelia Clark, do-eyed, looks like a doll, you know,

but she's got some strength to her, both in her face and in her body. And I think that that, in the long run, makes that character a lot more believable. I agree. So Clark's fresh out of drama school. She's got one episode of an English soap opera to her name. some bigger actresses were considered, but Clark won them over, Lizzie, when at the end of her audition,

she performed an impromptu funky chicken dance. Hell yeah. Nina Gold said, it was just this welcome relief. There's so much heavy stuff in Game of Thrones, showed that she had a sense of humor. To which I say, Lizzie, do you think if a man did a funky chicken dance in his audition?

He'd get the role. He'd be laughed out of Hollywood. What we let women get away with these days. That's right. If only she'd specify, her gum in their faces. That's right. It was, we should mention, a very heavy moment for a merchant.

Yeah. She said later, shooting that pilot was a really great lesson. It was an affirmation about listening to my instincts and following them. Because I tried to back out of that situation. And during the contract process, I did back out. I was talked back into it by some persuasive people. Then I found myself naked and afraid in Morocco and riding a horse that was clearly much more excited to be there than I was.

She goes on to say, I think it's a testament to Amelia Clark for me. making that role iconic. She was obviously excited to tell that story, but for me, it wasn't in my heart to tell it, end quote. So the cast and crew set out to film in Northern Ireland again, but now they shoot in Malta instead of Morocco. They build up bigger, more intricate sets. Every department steps up. And so from July to December 2010, they shoot all 10 episodes of season one, including the pilot. Now, part of the issue, Lizzie, is that HBO wasn't getting a full season out of their full season's worth of money. So a couple months before they wrapped shooting on season one,

an executive calls the boys up with some bad news. She says, have you guys seen the run times? And they say, yeah, what's up? And she goes, your episodes are clocking at 39 to 42 minutes. And they said, yeah, yeah. She goes, no, we're like a hundred minutes short off a full season of viable television. They had virtually no money left.

So they sat down and wrote a bunch of, quote, cheap scenes where there are just two or three people in a room talking. And at first, it was terrifying because they had to be interesting enough to justify their existence, but they couldn't move the plot forward past the point of the next scene that followed. Right, the set pieces they've already shot. Apparently it started to feel really fun. And there was one scene that they wrote between Robert and Cersie, and they realized we didn't have a single scene of these two characters alone before writing this scene.

So, interesting exercise. All right, quickly, key to the arrival of royalty, the herald or the music of Game of Thrones, a theme to tell the audience that this was no ordinary fantasy. But they almost ended up with a very different sound. The original composer hired Stephen Warbeck came with an HBO-esque prestige. Lizzie, he had won the Oscar for his work on your least favorite best picture winner of 1998, Shakespeare in Love. Ooh. Just kidding. His music is beautiful. He had also composed for Billy Elliott, Quills, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a lot of period piece material. Yeah. But in January 2011,

in mere months before the show's scheduled April release, Beniof and Weiss realized this score is working about as well as our CGI green suit white walkers. And being 30-something white-collar white dudes, they had just read Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink. So they go to the HBO Music Supervisor consultant Evan Clean, and they say, what's your blink response?

Who's the right composer for Game of Thrones? Don't even think about it. He goes, Ramin Jevety. And I think based on his credits, I wonder if the thinking was that Rameen could hybridize a rousing period-style score with somewhat more modern, propulsive elements. So his credits included Iron Man Prison Break,

Clash of the Titans, with our favorite hung from down and us, Sam Livington. Also, Jabidi came up under Hans Zimmer and worked as an assistant to Klaus Bedelt on Pirates the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl. This does make more sense. And Rameen says, look, I'm sorry, I'm just too busy, I can't do it. And I think they said something along the lines of like,

look, we got HBO money. Here's some money. Let's make this happen. And maybe he said, I'm not so busy. He's like, I am no longer busy. I can do it. Yeah. Secondary source. And he said, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Give me money. Give me money. Okay. So in April of 2011, just a few days before the reshoot of the pilot finally airs, Martin gives this interview to the Guardian. That's going to really set up the show. Like, you have to watch this. It's going to be good. Except he says, oh, God, what if it's terrible? If it's a flock, I worked out of Hollywood for 10 years on shows including the Twilight Zone, as well as a handful of pilots

that never saw the light of day, and I had my heartbroken a half a dozen times, so I know all the things that can go wrong. Not exactly the rallying cries who head into battle that HBO is hoping for. So Game of Thrones debuts on April 17, 2011, to very positive, but somewhat mixed review. So the New York Times asked,

what is Game of Thrones doing on HBO? When the network ventures away from its instincts for real world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga True Blood, things start to feel cheap. To which I say, excuse me, hands off my true blood. Thank you. Did you see the first three seasons of true blood? Because they're great. Yes. Game of Thrones serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant an idea beyond sketchily fleshed out notions that war is ugly.

Families are insidious and power is hot. Sorry, that's every show ever. Excuse me. Yeah. The Guardian was more positive. Don't listen to the naysayers. George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones gets better and better with each episode. The high density of the pilot may be the reason some of the early. early reviews were a little lukewarm. I suppose it's somehow fitting that a show about Iron Age people would draw critics with an axe to grind.

From what I've seen so far, it's all sword and very little sorcery. For his part, Craig Mason couldn't believe what Weiss and Beniof had pulled off. You had saved a complete piece of shit and turned it into something brilliant. Two days later, on April 19th, HBO announced they had greenlit the second season of Game of Thrones. But, Lizzie, it's important to note, the show was not yet a hit. Benioff later said the initial numbers were not that great. We were a little disappointed. They slowly climbed as the year went on. I looked this up. It's true. The first episode debuted to 2.22 million U.S. Watchers. That number ticked up across the first season to a finale of around 3 million watchers. Now, to give you some points of reference, the Sopranos had debuted to 3.45 million viewers. Wow.

True blood 1.44. The Wire 3.7. Deadwood 5.79. It was a slower burn than people were expecting. Benioff went on to say that the moment we felt it was working was when Ned is executed during season one. Yes. And it sort of seemed like the internet blew up. We were getting so many emails like, what have you done?

The fact that we got that reaction to a fictional character. Weiss, for his part, said he knew that it was going to work when he saw a viral video of a guy getting really upset over Ned's death. And it seems like this for the audience was the equivalent of brand being pushed out the window that had hooked Benny off and had hooked the studio. The show was not an immediate juggernaut. Viewership continued to grow basically linearly throughout the second season. And then, of course, Lizzie, it was the penultimate episode of the third season, The Raines of Castamere, which was the Red Wedding,

that took the Ned Stark beheading, said, hold my beer, let's take it up to 11. Yeah. And the show then in 2014 surpassed the Sopranos as HBO's most punt. popular show of all time. Episodes in the fourth season hit an average gross audience of 18.4 million breaking the record of 18.2 million

set by the 2002 season of the Sopranos. It of course became one of the most decorated shows of all time. But as we've learned, Lizzie, the crown weighs heavy upon the brow of the king. For George R. Martin, David Bennoff, and D.B. Y. Success became an unexpected burden.

Martin's output slowed considerably on a song of ice and fire after the original trilogy. So the first three books were published between 96 and 2000. A Feast for Crows followed in 2005. A Dance with Dragons was released a few months after Game of Thrones premiered in July of 2011, and the sixth book, The Winds of Winter, has been forthcoming for nearly 15 years. George, you gotta finish them.

Or just announce that they're done. I mean, George, do whatever you want, obviously. But maybe it would be better if you just freed yourself of it, of the burden. And as you mentioned, Lizzie, as a result, Beniof and Weiss, I think unexpectedly, ran out of material at a certain point when making this show. Completely unexpectedly. It's very fair to assume that he would finish the books by the time you finish the series. This resulted in the most successful from a viewership perspective,

and yet one of the most divisive finale's HBO has ever released. Now, should this episode garner a strong enough response, we will greenlight a second season in which we cover the controversial conclusion of the Game of Thrones series, which brings us to the end of our story and the assertion that Circe makes in episode seven of the first season, when you play the Game of Thrones, you win or die,

there is no middle ground. But as we learn today, what if that doesn't have to be true? The Game of Thrones pilot was a failure. They died. But then they lived again, and the show had an incredible life. And it did remind me of a couple of other shows,

not as extreme, that took a moment to find their footing. Two favorites of mine, The Office. The first season is a tough watch, in my opinion. It has some high moments. And then it really finds itself in season two.

This same can be said for parks and recreation. Yes. Wesley, nope, is, oh, my God, unbearable, I think, in the first season, and yet she is so wonderful when they figure her character out in the second and third season. And I think the conclusion that this brings me to is, if you believe, to the point that you were going to empower them with an incredible amount of money and the creative people that you're collaborating with, hopefully you believe in them enough to endure a couple of defeats along the way.

And if you don't, perhaps you never should have greenlit the thing in the first place. But the lesson I took away from this was not, you know, Benioff and Weiss merely failed upward from a position of privilege or anything like that. But more that, you know, we are not born fully baked in our ability to tell stories and our ability to work in these mediums. There are reasons that we have apprenticeship programs like coming up in writers' rooms and having showrunners teach the next generation of showrunners. by the way, a thing we are going to lose as we move away from writers' rooms, and if we move toward having individual AI-assisted showprunters writing entire seasons of television, the bottom rungs of this ladder will be removed, and we will lose a new generation who knows how to make this thing. So to me, it's proof that just because somebody fails at something the first time does not mean that they cannot do it or learn how to do it, as these two proved across this show. And so kudos to the team at HBO and Mr. Plepler for pushing forward on something that he easily could have said, you know what, we tried it and it just didn't work. Let's save ourselves $100 million.

So Lizzie, I have to ask you, what went right? You know, I think the casting went right, particularly of the children. And I'm aware that, you know, they ended up recasting some roles. I think even that went right. They did a great job in the roles that they recast. But this is a massive ensemble piece. and if any one person doesn't work, they're going to stick out like a sore thumb. And I got to be honest, in the final pilot that you can watch, nobody sticks out. Everybody fits into the world really perfectly. They look right. They act right. It's seamless. And I understood it took a second try and that's okay. But yeah, massive kudos to the casting director on this because I just think the cast is fantastic. And again, I love that they're unknowns. I think we should cast unknowns more often. I agree. The cast is. phenomenal. In this show, the cast is why I continued watching for a long time after I

candidly lost interest in much of the story. I think it remains Amelia Clark's best role. I really like her. I don't think people know how to use her exactly right. I agree. They tried to shove her into the Terminator franchise, but her strength, I think, is actually born from a resilience, not from like an initial hardness, which they were trying to kind of infringe upon her. Similarly, I think someone like Kit Harrington is very well suited to this. Richard Madden is very well suited to this. I think the material melds with some of these performers extremely well. I am going to give mine to George R.R. Martin, who I think has taken a lot of heat for not finishing

these darn books over time. But just what a cool story. What a rise from humble, unassuming beginnings to the point where he was powerful enough to turn down. offers to make the show on terms that weren't his own. And I respect, ultimately, the decision to say, I would rather risk somebody failing to make this show, but in the way that I would want it made, as opposed to going with a more sure bet who would make the show in a way that would compromise my vision. Yeah. Meaning, you know, I think it takes a lot of courage to say, I'd rather fail on my terms than succeed on somebody else's. Yeah. And you should be able to tell that by the hats he wears. Oh boy, you should see the hat he wore to that wedding in Morocco as a

Pentoshi nobleman. Actually, would you like to see it? Yes, I would. I have it right here. All right, let's see, because I think this was like George realized he had a penchant for it right here. Oh, yeah. God, he loves a hat. And you know what? He can wear a hat. It just looks like a folded pair of trousers on top of his head. Yeah, it looks like big old panties on his head. All right, guys, that concludes our coverage of the Game of Thrones pilot. If you guys are enjoying this, Maybe we can get our proverbial shit together in time to release an episode on the conclusion of Game of Thrones at the conclusion of the first season of the new series A Night of the Seven Kingdoms. So let us know. If you like this, I know some of you feel strongly that we shouldn't move into television to which I say, you're not my dad.

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To you we are forever in debt. All right. Thank you all so much for being here, and we will be back next week with a real shitstorm. We've got the interview. That's right. The movie that none of us really thought we needed,

and Amy Pascal definitely didn't need, more on that international... Disaster. The dumbest movies ever cause an international conflict ever. I'm very excited to talk about it next week. We will see you then. Thank you all for being here. And thank you for this episode, Chris.

Great job. All right. Talk to you guys then. Bye. Bye. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong. And check out our website at what went wrongpod.com. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Post production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krubsaw.