14 DAY TRIAL // Winter is coming on “Game of Thrones,” but so are major challenges for its showrunners. With season 3 of HBO’s incredibly popular series now officially over (last episode aired last night), fans are already thinking about what they should expect on season 4.
And, according to the showrunners, that would be “negative population growth.”
Fans who have already read George R.R. Martin’s original five novels, on which the HBO series is based, noticed that Sunday’s finale went two-thirds through the third book, “A Storm of Swords.”
This means that only two are left, “A Feast for Crows” and “A Dance with Dragons,” with Entertainment Weekly speculating that logic would dictate that the show covered both simultaneously in just one season – two, tops.
Because book 5 introduces countless new characters to the detriment of those the reader had already gotten accustomed to, doing the same with the show would be impossible, for a variety of reasons.
The most important would be money: though most HBO shows usually have an impressive budget for TV standards, the expenses of covering all the subplots (or at least the most important ones) in the books would mean financial ruin.
Then there’s the question of how much the audience can take: you simply can’t introduce a gazillion characters in a TV production and expect your viewers not to leave in hordes.
So, as showrunner Dan Weiss puts it, this means one thing: “Time for negative population growth.”
“I don’t think we want to answer specifically what we’re keeping and dropping, but we do take your point,” showrunner David Benioff chimes in.
“The series has already reached a point where there are so many characters, particularly in season three we’re introducing so many new ones, we run the risk of bursting at the seams as we try to cram every single subplot and all the various characters and it becomes impossible on a budgetary level and it becomes impossible on an episode-basis to jump around every few minutes to 30 different characters and locations,” he adds.
“We don’t want to do that, and recognize that as a real risk and we will take steps not to fall into that trap,” Benioff concludes.
All this time, Martin is yet to release the sixth book, “The Winds of Winter,” and hasn’t even started work on the seventh, “A Dream of Spring” – which might not even be the last in the series, he says.
Having already a reputation for missing deadlines and upsetting fans, Martin is strangely not worried that the show will catch up with him, which is probably exactly what’s keeping producers up at night.