The last time I really enjoyed watching a TV show.
Not like, "That was a fun twist." or "I'm so glad these two got together!", but more of just being engrossed in what was happening as it was happening and thinking to myself. "Wow, this is so good."
June 26, 2016
The season finale of Game of Thrones season six.
The Winds of Winter
We were paying for HBO Max or Max or HBO++ or something. It had aired an hour earlier but because everyone and their dog was trying to stream it at once the servers couldn't keep up and it would be all pixelated. So we did what any sane people would do and started the episode about a half hour later than its air time.
It's still hard to grasp the fact that this episode is nearly ten years old.
But it was everything you could want in a season finale of a show that was made up of 9 subplots in a trench coat.
I won't go into specifics about what happens so you won't be spoiled if you haven't sat through a billion hours of a TV show. But this was one of the episodes where major characters you thought had plot armor end up dying. While you are still in shock over what is going on in the show, more things start piling up. Everything on the screen gears you up for all the fun things that should happen in the next season. (But don't.)
So this being a show that HBO aired live on cable AND on streaming meant that you got new episodes every weekend. You couldn't sit and binge watch 9 hours of it at once like Netflix lets you do. All of our friends were watching it at the time as well, and after an episode ended you would get on your phone to start speculating what would happen next. A friend of mine from college was in town that weekend and came over to watch it with us. We had pizza and everything like we were sitting down to watch the Super Bowl.
Up until this point every episode of this show had been great. Those that had read the books already knew what to expect and were still excited over how it played out on screen.
Anyway, we sit down to watch the episode and every minute of it is amazing. We knew Cersei was planning something destructive with the Wildfire stores they kept showing us in all those episodes previous. But when it actually happened, and who it happened to, we were out of our seats.
Then the rest of the show proceeds to tie up things and prep us for what could happen in the next season. Arya gets revenge on her family, yay! (Her story should have ended there.) They show us who Jon's parents are. We finally get rid of Tommen. Meanwhile Daenerys is now traveling across the sea getting ready to become a problem for everyone else.
The show would never be this good again.
I miss sitting down and being engrossed in a show or movie. Like, just being able to enjoy it without noting the formula for the characters or that the hero is about to get out of an impossible situation because we only have 5-15 minutes left of the show.
I mean, I've watched good shows since then. Fleabag was great. The Crown was fun but with most of it I knew what was going to happen. The Mandalorian/Boba Fett shows were good but like all of these others they are one and done. I never rewatched episodes. I never thought about any of them. To be fair I never sat and rewatched Game of Thrones but I remember that one episode the most and just being all that impressed by it in the moment while watching it.