Winter isn’t coming quite as soon as everyone thought. It’s looking more like summer for the seventh season of HBO’s epic drama Game of Thrones. HBO announced on Monday that Game of Thrones won’t return until the summer of 2017. Let’s hope that the news of 23 Emmy nominations will satiate fans for an entire calendar year. Not only with it take a while to get here, but the final 2 seasons will be broken up into two 7-episode sessions. Surely this is more devastating than The Red Wedding.
Casey Bloys, president of HBO programming, explained that the release date shift (pushed back from the usual April) is because of the shooting schedule:
“Now that winter has arrived on Game of Thrones, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss felt that the storylines of the next season would be better served by starting production a little later than usual, when the weather is changing. Instead of the show’s traditional spring debut, we’re moving the debut to summer to accommodate the shooting schedule.”
Game of Thrones usually wins Emmys by the boatload, but this new season will miss out on the eligibility window for next year. The current rules state that a show needs to have aired by May 31 in order to be in contention. Does this mean that something that’s been in the Thrones shadow will be able to celebrate for one year? Attention Better Call Saul lovers and The Americans fanatics! Your time is now!
Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men did something similar for its final few seasons. The final seventh season was broken up into two 7-episode blocks, but, unlike Thrones, Mad Men debuted both parts in April.
How does this change make you feel? Are you going to re-binge all the episodes in mourning of the pushed back premiere date? Does it give Thrones agnostics (like myself) finally a chance to catch up on a series on its way out?
