The TV landscape is a very different and much busier place than it was when Game of Thrones launched in 2011, with some suggesting that the HBO fantasy epic might be the last true global small-screen sensation.
One person who doesn’t agree is Kit Harington – the Jon Snow actor told Digital Spy and other press that he believes there will eventually be another hit series that occupies the same space as GoT in our hearts.
HBO
“There’s [always] something new that comes along,” he said. “It’s hard to remember now in some ways, but when we were in our seasons one, two and three, Breaking Bad was ‘the biggest show there’s ever gonna be’ and before that, [it was] The Sopranos.
“It’s amazing to be in that category of being, I would say, one of the biggest shows on TV… but Thrones‘ll finish and then there’ll be something else that comes along.”
Pre-GoT, of course, no-one predicted that a show about dragons, magic and a fictional kingdom’s complex politics would be the Next Big Thing, and Harington suggested that the next TV hit will be something equally “unexpected”.
“Sopranos, no-one expected that – a TV show about gangsters. Breaking Bad, no-one expected that – a chemistry teacher who makes meth. Thrones came and changed the fantasy genre and no-one expected that. [So] it’ll be something that no-one expects.”
Helen Sloan/HBO
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However, Harington’s co-star Isaac Hempstead Wright, who plays Bran Stark, didn’t entirely agree with his on-screen adopted sibling.
“I don’t think there’ll be anything, at least in my lifetime, that becomes the phenomenon that Game of Thrones did,” Hempstead Wright told us. “It has changed the TV landscape, and TV now is a very different thing to what it was when we first embarked on this journey.
“It’s sort of the pinnacle of what everybody wants to do now. Films aren’t all that important in the face of a lot of television nowadays, and I think Game of Thrones is a genre-defining aspect of that.”
Game of Thrones season 8 airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic and NOW TV in the UK. Tune in to Digital Spy’s Game of Thrones livestreams on Monday evenings, straight after each episode, on Instagram and Facebook.
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