Is it me, or has the show's general quality diminished?

[Kman2544]

I agree...season five is the worst yet. It's a notable step down even from season four...

How?

[Lord Estermont]

IMO season 5 has been the weakest so far, its deviations from the books in earlier seasons were understandable but this season they re mostly dissapointing and find my self wondering what happened from the fair tv adaptation it was to this disaster that has been season 5, WHERE THE HELL ARE THE IRONBORN? Balon hasnt even died in the show

[Lordi Nietos]

I don't think the Queenmaker plot and Dorans speech in the books were bad in the books, but we can disagree on that. If Dorne was so bad that this is what came from adapting it why didn't they kill Balon and bring the kingsmoot and some Victarion vs Euron conflict?

[shadow282]

Obviously it's gone down a bit, but you have to consider the material they're adapting. Considering how stunningly mediocre (at best) it is, the fact that the show is still pretty good is incredibly impressive.

[Steelborn]

The writing quality dimished greatly. And that doesn't have to do with the books at all.

[Stag_legion]

At first I thought that maybe I was turned off because I read all the books and expected too much. However, my wife and daughter whom have not read the books but have watched the show from the beginning have both said the quality of all aspects of the show have deteriorated to the point that they're really not interested anymore.

Seems like this happens to a lot of cable series. GoT, True Blood, Walking Dead, on and on.

Breaking Bad seems to have gotten it right from start to finish.

****I also think the Sand Snakes are very disappointing.

To think....we've had the WoW held up for this crap.

Anytime the makers of a show become more concerned with pushing the number of viewers they have each week the a show suffers.

Breaking bad managed to be good through out to the end, because in contrast to the above shows, you got the feeling that the producer and co did a lot of planning with their show and actually cared about the artistic merit of their work.

[oopeed]

That lame fight on the Water Gardens compared to the awesome courtesy fight of Jaime and Ned back on season 1 was so pathetic that even Samwell could do it better.

The fight on Mereen where poor Ser Grandfather died was actually pretty decent, so I don't really get why they simply mucked up so bad in this one. It actually defeats the purpose of casting the Sand Snakes at all since their skill were never truly shown, they were completely miscasted and their role is pretty much over from now on, unless they venture into original creation, their story only has one more episode at most.

Maybe they put too much money on the pit scene and Drogon or we're going to see crowds and battles up in the north, otherwise it's unexplainable the drop on quality in scenes.

[Edmure's Floppy Fish]

Not you... Nor the show...It's the books... The last 2 books went from a 9 in quality to a soft 3! Its unfair to judge the show based on its quality AND it's faithfulness to the source material. Because the book dropped in quality after ASOS.

The GOT is still the most popular show on tv... Hard to argue with that.

[Stag_legion]

Not you... Nor the show...It's the books... The last 2 books went from a 9 in quality to a soft 3! Its unfair to judge the show based on its quality AND it's faithfulness to the source material. Because the book dropped in quality after ASOS.

The GOT is still the most popular show on tv... Hard to argue with that.

I think its pretty short sighted to think

popularity = quality

[Edmure's Floppy Fish]

I think its pretty short sighted to think

popularity = quality

I am basing it on the fact that there are thousands of other shows for the world to watch or pirate at 8 central every Sunday, but for some reason the majority of the world's tv viewers choose to watch GOT. Just because there is a great rift between book & show fans, and book readers think they have apparently read a different set of books than the rest of us, it doesn't mean that they have the authority to over rule the global demand for the show. The show isn't as bad as people try to make it out to be... Ok, D&D decided to exclude the excruciating details like, what the special recipe for pigeon broth is according to a cook in flea bottom and then going on to describe the # of holes in his cloak and then having the pov spend 40 pages explaining how this holey shirt reminds him of the salted beef from last night.

Just curious.. What determines quality in your opinion? Because unless you are a professional tv critic, or the Author of the series, I don't think your opinion of the show outweighs the majority of the world's opinion of the show.

Unlike with a consumer product, the only test to gauge quality in the services industry, is by measuring customers satisfaction.you can't measure durability or the like ...so it is safe to assume that if the quality of a.product is down, then, the the popularity of said product would be down, and vice versa.

It's not shortsighted, it's using the only objective data available.. RATINGS!... Your minority opinion is subjective!

Quality relative to popularity is the essence of a free market.

[SerDesmondHume]

I think a big thing people are forgetting is that most of the best characters/actors are gone. Internet Controversy, Book Changes, Slow Books, Bad scripting they don't matter if nobody actually wants to see any of the characters.

Rory McCann, Charles Dance, Pedro Pascal, Jack Gleeson, Rose Leslie, Ian McElhinney no more. aFfC and aDwD had characters like Stoneheart or Manderly, Griffs or the nuncles to replace the new holes in cast. The show hasn't added any of them. Well they casted some very disappointing sand snakes and about 3 minutes of Alexander Siddig and called it a day. They're handling Stannis a lot better at least. But how many of the storylines per episode are you looking forward to?

For me it's Jon or Stannis that I actually look forward to seeing. Everyone else is just filler to me. In the books I enjoyed most of the storylines.

[Dronuspk]

I think it's pretty much confirmed that season five has been the worst season of GoT so far.

Lol confirmed by who? Angry people that are upset Sansa lost her virginity to Ramsay?

I personally think it is great and will continue getting better. :dunno:

[Stag_legion]

The last episode got the worst critical rating of the show ever, and I think the other episodes of the season would have bad ratings too if critics weren't on the hype bandwagon.

[SerDesmondHume]

Lol confirmed by who? Angry people that are upset Sansa lost her virginity to Ramsay?

I personally think it is great and will continue getting better. :dunno:

There's lots of people who don't like this season

Like you mentioned

We have the PC people who are riled about the end of last episode

We have the book readers who don't like the adaptation

We have people who didn't like the last two books either and are upset with how similar this season still has with them even with the changes

We have the people who are just finding it stale

We have people who think that the quality isn't so good anymore for reasons they'd find in non adaptation tv shows.

Theres lots of people turning against this show.

[Dronuspk]

There's lots of people who don't like this season

Like you mentioned

We have the PC people who are riled about the end of last episode

We have the book readers who don't like the adaptation

We have people who didn't like the last two books either and are upset with how similar this season still has with them even with the changes

We have the people who are just finding it stale

We have people who think that the quality isn't so good anymore for reasons they'd find in non adaptation tv shows.

Theres lots of people turning against this show.

Lol. We'll see when E7 rolls around.

[Mikey Triangles]

Yeah first two seasons were amazing. It has been taking a dip but it is still way better than any other show on TV. I guess they know that so they have room to sag

[yanmaodao]

I started as a show-only watcher who only started reading the books within the past year, despite having started watching the show in 2011 (after season 1, before season 2). And though I hadn't read the books at that point, during the wait until season 2 I essentially learned everything that happened in the books because I became so engrossed in the world. Every season after the 1st, I knew what was going to happen ahead of time, and had to watch them all episodically rather than binging, so the following is an apples to apples comparison.

I think by the time this season's done, I'll rank it at the bottom. My rankings will go: 1, 4, 2<-->3, 5. (Which one of season 2 or 3 I prefer seems to depend on the day. I give the slight edge of season 2, though. It had a sense of forward, foreboding momentum via the Stannis and Theon arcs that season 3 lacked, though season 3 had higher highs than season 2. Season 4 had even higher highs and lower lows than the previous two seasons, but when it hit high, it really hit high, and fairly often.)

The source material plays a big part. Considering the pacing of AFFC/ADWD, season 5 was always going to have issues. Season 4 was helped by beginning in media res and having the Purple Wedding happen in episode 2, which was the engine that powered the rest of the season and spared us the "intentionally slow down the rest of the season for a MIND BLOWING EPISODE NINE" routine.

The show has always struggled with invented storylines. It started with the Qarth storyline, which was painful for me because I liked Dany so much in season 1. It's odd because the show does invented scenes so well. Pretty much all of the best talky, non-action scenes were show inventions. It may be that D&D are great tacticians but poor strategists. Given a properly structured arc, they can flesh it out really well with invented scenes, but truly struggle with wholly invented arcs. Which would seasons 6 and 7 fall under? Hopefully the outline they have will anchor them enough. For season 6, at least, they'll probably have an advance manuscript of WoW to guide them. Unless WoW doesn't improve on the issues with AFFC and ADWD... then we're all fucked. (Since GRRM said there'll be no new POV's, though, I don't think this will happen.)

I agree with those who say we shouldn't really judge season 5 until we've seen all of it and gotten some perspective. But if it doesn't really get better, I'd actually diagnose the problem as D&D not being daring enough. The source material was not adaptable as is. But as someone pointed out, with Tyrion still not probably reaching Dany until episodes 8/9, and the Dorne plot only really getting started in episode 6, the underlying problem has not been fixed. Instead of new characters show watchers won't care about, existing characters are taking their place and doing things we don't care much about.

What would be daring, and what might have worked, is a mid-season time skip, the one GRRM should have done all along. Not in years, though, but in months; it would get Tyrion to Dany much quicker, Arya to have progressed further in her training, and certain rushed storylines (like the Sparrows taking over King's Landing) to feel more natural. The show has always excelled in simultaneously informing the audience while not showing their hand too much. (For instance, in one of this season's better storylines, explaining greyscale to the audience while simultaneously humanizing Stannis and giving us a sweet Sam/Gilly scene on separate occasions. Having re-watched S4E1 recently, even a small moment such as the Lannister soldier taunting Oberyn, "get him a shaved goat and a bottle of olive oil!", world-building for the audience and letting us know that Dorne is supposed to be the Latin/Mediterranean culture surrogate, in a way that weaved in seamlessly within the scene.) So I think they could have handled backing up and explaining the few things the audience missed during the time skip well enough. Would that have felt too much like an insult to GRRM, though? Possibly, which is why they never would have gone there. Anyway, just one idea.

Still, I'm still really enjoying the season. There's nothing quite like it on TV.

[yanmaodao]

Double post. And is it just me, or does this site have an abnormally big issue with double/triple posting?

[Dronuspk]

Double post. And is it just me, or does this site have an abnormally big issue with double/triple posting?

Yeah, I've done it quite a few times. It's just recently though it seems, never had that problem before.

[TFP]

The sand snakes (dull and tiresome in the books but campy and absurd, as well as dull, in the show) have been fairly awful but everything else imo has been a very creditable interpretation of very flaky source material.