14 DAY TRIAL // Season four of HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones” premiered this Sunday and pretty much broke the Internet and killed it in ratings, bringing the network the highest-rated episode since the 2007 finale of “The Sopranos,” with 6.6 million viewers.
With no doubt in mind that the series is the biggest television event in recent years, the question constantly arises: yes, but what happens if George R.R. Martin, the author of the “Song of Ice and Fire” series of novels on which it’s based, takes too long to write the final novels?
Martin writes particularly slow because, as you must know if you’ve watched a single episode of the HBO show or have read the books, the world he’s creating is very complex and the plotlines are tangled. Also, the night is dark and full of terrors, to quote one of Melissandre’s very wise one-liners.
This means that it’s very likely for the show to catch up to the books and Martin still be nowhere too close to coming out with a new novel. Show writer Bryan Cogman says that, in case this happens, HBO will take the reins.
It’s already a known fact that Martin has shared with producers the ending he has planned, so this shouldn’t be an impossible feat to pull.
“Yeah, obviously I can’t say a ton about the future of the show but I think we have made it really clear that we aren’t stopping. We have talked with George and I think he understands that we can’t really stop either,” Cogman says in a new interview cited by Yahoo!.
“We have the end mapped out and are excited about the show and all of the possibilities. It is a bit unprecedented but I imagine it will still appeal to both fans of the books and of the shows. And George is hard at work on the last two books, I know a lot of people get frustrated because they love this story so much and they want to see it finished, but it’s not just like he can press a magic button. He’s plugging away at it,” he adds.
Martin might be hard at work but, as he said on various occasions, he’s not the kind of man who likes to be rushed or pushed into doing something. When the muse comes, she comes, and there’s no ordering her around.
On the other hand, producers on the HBO series are under a lot of pressure to wrap things up because the young actors are growing up. They can’t shoot more than a season per year so that means that some of the young leads will be near-adults by the time they shoot their final episode – and HBO is trying to get to it as quickly as possible.
If you think about it, this is actually excellent news, even if the TV series might end up straying from Martin’s story. It can surely stand on its own by now, so that won’t be a problem.