Seaon 6 of HBO's Game Of Thrones premiered last night, and shows no sign of slowing down -- or does it? Despite being renewed for a seventh season very quickly, the program's showrunners have a finite set of plans when it comes to the series as whole. Showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff wouldn’t say much on how long the series plans to run, but that they're approaching the story with a very clear endgame in mind: "We’re approaching the finish line. From the outset, our hope was to tell a complete story — beginning, middle and end. We are writing the final act now, and the last thing we want to do is stay on stage after the play is over."
In terms of story, the television show has now eclipsed the book, something that the showrunners saw as inevitable, given the circumstances. "We realized we’d probably catch the books when we spent several days with George in Santa Fe in 2013, discussing the future of the book series and the television series. George’s schedule is very much his own, as it should be for a novelist. But we’re locked into a set schedule — a new season every year. In the beginning, we hoped that if the show worked, we’d get seven seasons to tell the tale. Seven kingdoms, seven gods, seven books — seven felt like a lucky number. The actual messiness of storytelling might not be quite that numerologically elegant, but we’re looking at somewhere between 70 and 75 hours before the credits roll for the last time. The show has diverged from the books quite dramatically by this point, but it’s still George’s world: The characters he’s dreamt up in the world he created. At this point, given the fact that we’re outpacing the novels, we all see the upside in the divergence: book readers won’t be spoiled by what’s to come on the show, and the show audience won’t have to worry about spoilers from the unpublished books. And we’re very happy that the show has led so many people to discover George’s amazing books."
Are you going to see Game Of Thrones through until the end, or do you plan to wait for Martin's next installment?
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