We may have to wait a bit longer than usual for the next season of Game of Thrones, and there’s a very good reason: The show needs winter to actually show up first. 
 
 
 
 The HBO series normally debuts every new season in April, but season seven will likely launch later in 2017, as showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss revealed in a podcast interview with UFC Unfiltered: 
 
 We’re starting a bit later because at the end of this season, ‘Winter is here’ - and that means that sunny weather doesn’t really serve our purposes any more. So we kind of pushed everything down the line, so we could get some grim grey weather even in the sunnier places that we shoot. 
 
 This implies we’ll see some of our more traditionally sunny lands of Westeros in entirely new ways. We’re used to the chilly environments of Winterfell and the Wall, but imagine seeing King’s Landing or Highgarden covered in clouds, rain, or even snow. And where are the people of Dorne supposed to go, since their entire kingdom seems to be made of nothing but porches and patios? 
 
 Game of Thrones is looking to have just two more shortened seasons before the series ends. The good news is that even if these final two seasons begin later that usual, they could still end in June, as per usual. It all depends on when, exactly, winter is coming ... in the real world. 
 
 [Digital Spy] ||||| As it’s moved beyond the George R.R. Martin novels, the series has evolved both for better and for worse. 
 
 Well, that was more like it. Sunday night’s Game of Thrones finale, “The Winds of Winter,” was the best episode of the season—the best, perhaps, in a few seasons. It was packed full of major developments—bye, bye, Baelor; hello, Dany’s fleet—but still found the time for some quieter moments, such as Tyrion’s touching acceptance of the role of Hand of the Queen. I was out of town last week and thus unable to take my usual seat at our Game of Thrones roundtable. But I did have some closing thoughts about what the episode—and season six in general—told us about how the show has evolved. 
 
 Last season, viewers got a limited taste—principally in the storylines in the North—of how the show would be different once showrunners Benioff and Weiss ran out of material from George R.R. Martin’s novels and had to set out on their own. But it was this season in which that exception truly became the norm. Though Martin long ago supplied Benioff and Weiss with a general narrative blueprint of the major arcs of the story, they can no longer rely on the books scene by scene. Game of Thrones is truly their show now. And thanks to changes in pacing, character development, and plot streamlining, it’s also a markedly different show from the one we watched in seasons one through four—for the worse and, to some degree, for the better.
– The wait for the next season of Game of Thrones just got a bit longer because, as io9 reports, winter isn't coming. At least not yet. New seasons of Game of Thrones typically debut in April, but weather in the European locations where the show films could push that back, the Verge reports. “We’re starting a bit later because at the end of this season ‘winter is here’—and that means that sunny weather doesn’t really serve our purposes any more," Thrones creators Dan Weiss and David Benioff say on the UFC Unfiltered podcast. "So we kind of pushed everything down the line so we could get some grim, gray weather even in the sunnier places that we shoot.” And who knows, if the real-life winter holds off long enough George RR Martin might even have time to finish the next book.