We’re getting ever closer to an actual Game of Thrones Season 8 premiere date. We knew the show wouldn’t be returning for its eighth and final season until 2019, and today HBO programming president Casey Bloys revealed that Season 8 will be on the air sometime in the first half of 2019. This would actually be a return to form for Thrones, which first premiered in April 2011 and kept that April debut slot all the way up until Season 7, for which production was delayed so the show could capture a more icy climate for the coming winter.

Game of Thrones Season 7 debuted in July 2017 as a TV version of a summer blockbuster of sorts, but if I had to guess, I’d wager that Game of Thrones Season 8 might debut closer to April or so. The clues are in what else HBO has programmed and on tap for 2019, as they tend to roll out one drama series at a time—I assume the highly anticipated second season of Big Little Lies will stick to that show’s successful timeline of airing from February to April, which would serve as a terrific lead in for Game of Thrones.

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Or it’s possible those two shows could swap slots, and Game of Thrones Season 8 could arrive in February. But I’d place my bet on April, as that would also allow the final season of Thrones to serve as a lead in to the next series on deck, which could be True Detective Season 3, or perhaps the limited series Chernobyl. What we likely won’t be seeing in 2019 is Westworld Season 3, as producers of that series took a year off to write and create the show’s second season and will probably do the same for the third season.

Whatever the case, and whenever HBO decides to air it, Game of Thrones Season 8 will be an event the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. While the series finales of Breaking Bad and Mad Men were big deals, Game of Thrones is the most popular show in HBO’s history, and fans the world over are dying to know how it all ends.

But of course it won’t be the end, as Bloys also revealed today that the first Game of Thrones prequel series will likely go into production sometime in January as they’re on the hunt for a director right now. What is dead may never die.

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