Where Game of Thrones Went WrongI think they went wrong when they turned down HBO ' s urgent offer of 10 seasons . Once you make the choice to limit it to 7 , you simply have to start making massive cuts and the original blueprint stops working , and then timemoney pressures force you to cobble together a new blueprint without being able to fit the plot strands together logically and build them up . If you accept the 7 season limitation as a given , the show ' s many passionate defenders are much harder to argue with . If you put the real Dorne , Ironborn , fAegon , fArya , Mance , Stannis and Tyrell plots back into the mix it would be spread unmanageably thin . Even with the much more limited scope they ' ve chosen , they ' re still having to rush and not build up and earn their big moments . The cardinal sin was trying to shorten it . Once you make that choice , you ' re painted into a corner . This is the point in this endless debate where the defenders start to explain why 15 seasons is unrealistic in logistical terms . The show has proven just as popular and addictive on a larger scale than the books and they could have absolutely kept a massive audience for 15 seasons , even if they had to change actors to deal with aging and casting problems which they ' re doing anyway without driving their audience down . Slow and steady would and should have won the race and produced billions of extra revenue in long run . The worst of it is that we won ' t grasp the full damage of this decision until the finale has aired and people start rewatching and realizing how many crippling plot and character discontinuities there are . As long as there ' s Season 7 , pts . 1 2 to look forward to , hope can be held out that it will all tie together and end magnificently , proving the book purists wrong .