Is Game of Thrones the #1 most watched TV show ever?

It holds the record for most Emmy Awards (59) & most Emmy nominations (161). In just about every publication, GoT is ranked as one of the best shows of all time. Ironically, it was originally written to be “unfilmable.” In the late 1970s, George R.R. Martin quit his teaching job to try to become a full-time writer. Martin had some success selling science fiction short stories and novellas, but then in 1983, his novel “The Armageddon Rag” was such a commercial failure that it “essentially destroyed my career as a novelist.” Desperate for work, Martin went out to Hollywood and secured a job as a staff writer in television. 

The money was good but the work was frustrating. Later talking about what spurred him to write “A Game of Thrones”—the first book in his “Song of Ice and Fire” series—Martin said, “I worked in Hollywood for about 10 years, from the late ’80s to the ’90s. 

I’d been on the staff of The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. All of my first drafts tended to be too big or too expensive. I always hated the process of having to cut.” 

So Martin left Hollywood—“I said, ‘I’m sick of this, I’m going to write something that’s as big as I want it to be.” He decided, “I’m going to write something just as big as my imagination, I’m going to have all the characters I want, and gigantic castles, and dragons, and direwolves, and hundreds of years of history, and a really complex plot, and it’s fine because it’s a book. 

It’s essentially unfilmable.” “The irony is, of course,” Martin said, “that’s what became filmed.” Takeaway 1: Martin began writing Game of Thrones because he was “sick of” TV producers telling him his scripts were “too big or too expensive.” “It’s very important to know what you don’t like,” Jerry Seinfeld says. 

“A big part of innovation is saying, ‘You know what I’m really sick of?’ … ‘What am I really sick of?’ is where innovation begins. Takeaway 2: Martin wrote the world and the characters he wanted to exist. Rick Rubin famously began making hip-hop albums because the hip-hop albums at the time didn't sound like the music in the hip-hop clubs he loved going to. Still to this day, Rubin says: "I just try to make my favorite music…I make what I want to exist." “When the book started hitting the bestseller list…I immediately started getting interest from Hollywood. 

I had a number of meetings with people who said, ‘this is the next Lord of the Rings franchise.’ But they couldn’t get a handle on the size of the material, the very thing that I set out to do. I had all these meetings saying, ‘There’s too many characters, it’s too big — Jon Snow is the central character. 

We’ll eliminate all the other characters and we’ll make it about Jon Snow.’ Or ‘Daenerys is the central character. We’ll eliminate everyone else and make the movie about Daenerys.’ And I turned down all those deals.” — George R.R. Martin