Prepare for Winter: 'Game of Thrones' is summer's biggest blockbuster
The summer's biggest blockbuster is finally here, and it's not playing at a theater near you.
The seventh season of HBO's “Game of Thrones” begins at 8 p.m. Sunday, July 16, after a 13-month hiatus - long enough for the new crop of seven episodes to miss the eligibility window for September's Emmys, giving other programs a shot at TV's throne.
Audiences have already crowned the show; last year's season finale was watched live by a series-high 8.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen. That caps off a year in which an average of 23.3 million people watched every episode live and via streaming, as reported by USA Today. “The Walking Dead” pulls in larger live numbers on a weekly basis for AMC, but no show can match “Game of Thrones” for global appeal - Business Insider named it the most popular show in the world for 2016.
Expectations for Season 7 are higher than the show's towering wall of ice, and two long-promised plot lines should meet them: The undead army that lives north of that wall is ready to move south; and Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), backed by a fleet of ships and her three dragons, will attempt to conquer the seven kingdoms of Westeros and take the Iron Throne from Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey).
But how did “Game of Thrones” become the world's biggest show? It's not as if George R.R. Martin's original novels were runaway hits before the series premiered in 2011, and the story is not easy for an audience to understand - I watched Season 3, for example, with the closed captioning on just to keep it all straight. Every episode is an epic spectacle, but those aren't in short supply, especially in the summer.
As it is for almost every great TV show, it's the characters who bring us back - even though the show taught us early on not to get too attached, killing off protagonist Ned Stark (Sean Bean) in the ninth episode. Westeros is populated with complex, unpredictable, idiosyncratic people with multiple emotional arcs. Maisie Williams has guided Arya Stark from prepubescent troublemaker to coldblooded teenage killer. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's Jaime Lannister began as a brash, acid-tongued rogue and emerges as one of the game's most morally conflicted players.
Perhaps the most surprising emergence, to this viewer who never read the books, belongs to Jon Snow (Kit Harington), the baby-faced warrior raised as Ned's illegitimate son and shunned by his surrogate mother, Catelyn (Michelle Fairley).
For the first few seasons, Jon's story was the least interesting as he toiled away as a member of the celibate Night's Watch, sworn to defend Westeros from creatures its inhabitants refused to believe in. In Season 5, Jon brought the humans from beyond the wall (known as wildlings) and the Watch together - and was murdered for it, by his sworn brothers. Two episodes later, the witch Melisandre (Carice van Houten) brought Jon back from the dead, the traitors were hanged, and Jon began plotting to take back his home of Winterfell.
Season 6 ends with Jon being named King of the North by the clans supporting Winterfell, in a sense completing his journey - but a new one will undoubtedly begin when he meets Daenerys for the first time.
But will Jon and Daenerys learn they are both Targaryens, as was suggested in the finale? That may prove to be one of this season's key questions. I can't wait for the answers.
<i>Sean Stangland is a Daily Herald multiplatform editor. You can follow him on Twitter at @SeanStanglandDH.</i>