Bryan Cogman reflects on writing his first Game of Thrones episode 15 years later

Bryan Cogman thought his first Game of Thrones script was practice, and 15 years later, that “exercise” still reads like one of television’s luckiest career turns. The writer looked back on Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things, the fourth episode of Season 1, in a long Bluesky thread marking its anniversary.

The episode first aired on HBO on May 8, 2011, and Cogman recalled how he went from assistant and lore-keeper to credited writer after Benioff called him the morning after he submitted the script and said, “Well,” Benioff told him, “you just wrote Episode 4 of Game of Thrones.” 

Quick Read:

• Bryan Cogman reflected on writing his first Game of Thrones episode 15 years later.
• The episode was Season 1 Episode 4, Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things.
• Cogman originally thought the script was only a writing exercise.

Bryan Cogman’s Game of Thrones break began with lore, luck, and one very important spreadsheet

Before Cogman wrote dialogue for Westeros, he was the person helping everyone understand it. During pre-production in 2009, the team needed quick, digestible guides to Martin’s dense world, so Cogman created family trees, character summaries, kingdom histories, and primers on religion and lore.

“I became considered the in-house ‘expert,’” he wrote a lengthy thread on Bluesky, “though I would never have classified myself as such.” That work got him into meetings, and according to Cogman, Benioff and Weiss already had larger plans for him. He learned about those plans from a UK immigration letter that described him as an “essential” member of the production and said they wanted to make him a producer one day. Cogman called it “A debt I can never repay.”

His reflection also carries a sad modern note. He wrote, “It saddens me that there are productions that undoubtedly use ChatGPT now to get this kind of stuff done, instead of utilizing an eager, hard-working, creative assistant,” adding, “It’s not lost on me that there are many kids starting out who won’t get the opportunities I did.”

Cogman’s rise was not just about talent. It was about proximity, trust, and being allowed to prove himself before anyone knew what the show could become.

How Cogman helped shape Bran Stark, Arya Stark, and the wild first season

Credits: HBO

When Benioff and Weiss gave Cogman Episode 4, he assumed it was not real. “If I’d known I was writing Episode 4 of a brand new HBO show when first given the assignment,” he wrote, “I’d probably still be writing it.”

HBO had asked the showrunners to bring in freelance writers, and Season 1 already had names like Martin and Espenson. Cogman had no produced credits, but Benioff and Weiss backed him anyway. “They felt like a rep company in those days,” Cogman wrote. “The creatives and execs truly felt like collaborators. It ain’t always that way.”

His proudest contribution almost did not exist. HBO was wary of leaning too hard into fantasy, and “There were no Bran visions in the original outline,” Cogman wrote. Still, he added one. “F**k it, I’ll write it anyway,” he recalled. That became the three-eyed raven sequence, “Not too fantastical, but enough to signal where we were going.”

He also helped shape the Ned and Arya staircase scene, using To Kill a Mockingbird as a tonal reference for Arya’s aching rejection of the future expected of her. “It was my job to get the ball rolling and make sure what we wanted when we wrote it got put on screen,” he wrote.

Cogman still calls the episode “a Frankenstein monster,” noting Benioff and Weiss wrote several key scenes but did not take co-writing credit. He takes pride in Ned’s investigation and Daenerys’ line, “The last time you have hands.” Still, he gives Martin credit for Catelyn’s inn speech, saying, “I just typed that speech out in Final Draft.”

All eight seasons of Game of Thrones are available to stream on HBO Max.

Also Read: First image from Game of Thrones: The Mad King stage play teases Rhaegar and Lyanna’s story