Wait, we could've had two more seasons of Game of Thrones?
Apparently so, if Game of Thrones original creator and author George R. R. Martin's wishes were granted. In a new book titled Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontier, journalist James Andrew Miller reports that according to Martin's agent, Paul Haas, Martin flew to New York to beg an HBO executive to make the series 10 seasons long.
Miller conducted 757 interviews for the book, including with Martin, Haas, and Richard Plepler, HBO's former CEO.
"George would fly to New York to have lunch with Plepler, to beg him to do ten seasons of ten episodes because there was enough material for it and to tell him it would be a more satisfying and more entertaining experience," Haas told Miller in an interview for the book.
Although Miller and HBO executives would have loved to have more seasons of the series, the show's showrunners, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, had different plans.
"Dan and Dave were tired, rightfully so," Haas explains in Miller's book. "They were done, and wanted to move on, so they cut it short and then negotiations became, how many seasons can we stretch this out? Because of course HBO wanted more."
He continued, "George loves Dan and Dave, but after season five, he did start to worry about the path they were going because George knows where the story goes. He started saying, 'You're not following my template.'"
The book series on which Game of Thrones is based on, A Song of Ice and Fire, is not yet finished, which may be why Martin was reluctant to have the series end after only eight seasons. Martin has published the first five out of seven planned novels and is continuing to write The Winds of Winter, which he has been writing for almost 10 years, he explains in the book.
"I wish it had run for ten years," Martin said in the book. "I think that would've given us a little more time in the later seasons to end it. But that might be just because I'm still trying to end it in these books here."
"I'm working on The Winds of Winter even now as I have been for the best part of a decade," the author continues. "And hopefully I'm going to get to that end soon and then people can argue about which ending they like better."
Though we may have missed out on a few extra seasons of Game of Thrones, we can always take comfort in knowing Sansa will forever be the Queen in the North.