Game of Thrones' eighth and final season was nominated for ten Emmy awards, but ended up taking home just two last night: Outstanding Supporting Actor for Peter Dinklage and the big one, Outstanding Drama. Now, no matter your thoughts on season and its Emmy deservedness—and if have a functioning central nervous system you probably had thoughts—you can't deny there was one hell of a conversation surrounding Game of Thrones' endgame.
The cast was asked backstage at the ceremony about the "controversy" around the series, a topic star Kit Harrington chose to address by revealing he hadn't watched it yet [via EW].
“I still haven’t seen the show...So that’s how I dealt with that controversy — I haven’t seen the final season but I know what it took to shoot it. It was hard and all of them put their love and effort into it. Controversy, I think for us, we knew what we were doing was right, storywise, and we knew that it was right for the characters because we lived with them for 10 years. Controversy for us didn’t really affect us.”
Kit Harrington's a talented dude and seemingly a great guy, but this comment keeps nudging us down a slippery slope to the unfound conclusion where any art that was hard to make needs to be praised. Harrington had similar thoughts a few months ago, back when we generally assumed he'd seen some of the season, telling Esquire, “Whatever critic spends half an hour writing about this season and makes their judgement on it, in my head they can go fuck themselves. Because I know how much work was put into this.”
Note: Three hours of shoveling dog poop still results in a big pile of dog poop.
For what it's worth, co-showrunner D.B. Weiss also eventually chimed in, making a good point about future generations who will grow up forming opinions on Game of Thrones.
“It’s not really up for us to decide what people feel about it,” Weiss said. “Hope people watch and like it in the future. There’s no way to tell how things are going to be perceived in 10, 20, even five years. These things change so fast. The landscape of television changes so quickly, it’s changing as we’re standing here right now. It’s so gratifying to have reached this many people. I hope people a little too young to watch now will grow up to learn about it and watch it as well.”
For more on last night's Emmy Awards, check out the links below: