Birthday special: How HBO adapted George RR Martin’s ‘unfilmable’ books

In 2006, Martin, who was already a big name in the world of fantasy fiction, was approached by then little-known screenwriters David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for the possibility of an adaptation of his sprawling series. Martin, quite understandably, was reluctant, since the very reason he had written A Song of Ice and Fire was to escape the limitations of TV.

David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, Game of Thrones creators.

That Benioff and Weiss were thinking of doing it on HBO, the sole place where a series with such excessive violence, sex and budget could be adapted, convinced Martin. That, and the fact that the duo answered the one question Martin asked correctly. The question was, “Who is Jon Snow’s mother?”. The said mystery was, incidentally, revealed in the show’s season 7 finale.

Still, the road ahead was not so simple. Even for an HBO show, the world of A Song of Ice and Fire was too complex, too big and too expensive to put on the screen. Several things could go wrong. And many did, at the very beginning. Benioff and Weiss shot a pilot, which was summarily rejected by exacting execs at HBO. The earning back of the trust was difficult. They took the period between the rejection and the production of a new pilot as a probationary period. “That first year felt very probationary. It was like, all right, these guys are probably not very good at this. Let’s see what they can do. We’ve already sunk a lot of money into this pilot. Might as well get one season out of it,” Benioff told Variety in a 2015 interview. The pilot was received well, and rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Game of Thrones has become one of the biggest things in pop culture. It has won the most Emmys for any drama series – 47, including the 2018 edition. By the time it ends (sometimes next year), it will have taken its place in a long line of legacy TV shows to come out of HBO’s hallowed corridors. And it is the only one that is full of stuff most legacy TV viewers would otherwise scoff at – dragons and magic and whatnot. Even when it will end, it won’t truly disappear. Before its final season had finished its principal photography, several spinoffs were confirmed by the network. One even has a showrunner.