Meh I don't know about the bite someone in the ass part - you're right a lot of shows don't get as much critical acclaim after one good season but not many highly watched shows lose their audiences entirely in two seasons. It's fairly risk free to renew something that's popular now for two more years.

The time jumps aren't really the problem, the way they have been framed by the directors and the way they sometimes have clearly not been well thought out is the problem.

I hate this type of comment. Yes the fictional show has fictional magical characters and beasts. That doesn't excuse bad writing. And yes, it is bad writing to do quick jumps in time without bothering to ensure that the events logically would have made sense had they not jumped in time.

Homecoming also did way better than expected in its opening weekend and I feel like a reasonable person would lump the first two weekends together and say it did as expected or better overall.

I'm not saying the president shouldn't take time off, I'm saying they shouldn't be going on lavish vacations that have a high cost to taxpayers. There are plenty of more reasonable vacation options to just blow off steam. And like I said before, any candidate who absolutely has to go to a certain place, so on, I'm…

I'm sorry - I do. Normal people don't take an entourage of Secret Service agents and require renting out an entire hotel at the cost of taxpayers when they take their vacations. And also, I don't want a "normal person" to be president - I want someone who is going to work their ass off for four years and put their…

I've been saying this for years, presidents should not be given a blank check for their expenses. I think it's ridiculous that presidents take vacations which cost taxpayers millions after the costs of their protection and private travel is taken into factor. This falls in that vein - presidents need to be held…

You keep saying the show is stupendously profitable without even bothering to address my valid counters there so I'll repeat myself too. Something only stays stupendously profitable if you keep revenue increasing in line with expenses which was not going to happen once the entire cast got raises. I've already pointed…

That's because Dinklage is an excellent actor.

I mean they likely will still have all of that. HBO is notorious for taking the cast of one of their hit shows and spreading them into new hit shows. D&D already have a new show worked out with HBO. And Game of Thrones itself had 4-5 spin-offs in development last I heard.

Let me put it a different way - I don't buy that HBO had nothing to do with this and were willing to spend whatever to keep Game of Thrones on. Maybe they did want to keep the show on for more seasons but told D&D they'd have to do so with the same budget even though the cast costs were going to go up by a ton. Maybe…

The point for HBO to lie is to not draw the ire of the millions of people who subscribe and like this show - because their model isn't based on people tuning into one show, it's based on people paying a monthly fee.

Posted a reply to this same thought from someone else above - long story short, don't buy it.

Might be the case but how does that excuse the pace of this season?

I'm sure HBO would like twenty years of Game of Thrones content - I don't buy that they want to pay what they would have to pay to keep Peter Dinklage, Kit Harrington, Emilia Clarke, and the rest for that many more seasons.

That just doesn't ring as genuine to me - the story is clearly being rushed and the only beneficiary of rushing to the ending is HBO. The cast only signed through six seasons so HBO likely is going to be paying a lot more for the seventh season - that's why no one ever believed the show would go longer than seven…

Sigh…and now I firmly believe that the shortened seasons and increase in pace is going to ruin the finish of this show. This was the culmination of rushed plots that just don't resonate as well as the writers hoped. We just saw Sansa and Arya reunite, so splitting them up seems like a disingenuous way to create drama.…

I agree (going to just put my response in tags just in case):

For me it's more just that shows aren't any fun to watch - all of the characters are always pissed off or in the dumps, the majority of the shows are shot at night or in a dark room which makes a lot of the action look like shit, and the writers just don't understand pacing at all. Give me Agents of SHIELD's last two…

He went to his dad's bedroom to kill Tywin, found Shae there instead and rage-killed her in the moment (he never planned to kill her, she was just there), and then went and found his dad. My point was he never intended to kill Shae and she wasn't the reason he killed Tywin.