It’s hard to believe the current Game of Thrones season is over (or will be, when this article is published). It’s been a stressful season for many reasons, not because of cliffhangers and character deaths, but because of the leaky nature of this season as a whole. Episode 4 was leaked a couple days before it aired. Soon after, the scripts for Episodes 5 and 7 followed. And in a blunder that had nothing to do with hackers, Episode 6 was aired once, the Wednesday before it was supposed to air. It was a nightmare for people like me who had to avoid YouTube comment sections and recommended videos and even be wary on other social media sites because for a few days there were two types of people: those who had seen the leaked episode, and those who had not.
It stands to show the fortitude of the fans of this show because the leaks have not affected the number of viewers. Each week the show crushes its own records. And somehow the finale stayed under wraps until it was originally supposed to air. Yet I have heard the idea of releasing the final season all in one go, since it is only 6 episodes (albeit about the same minutes-wise as a regular season). I’m torn on how I feel. If someone said the final season was available somewhere and I could watch all of it in one go, I might just pounce on it. On the other hand, what I discovered this year between the off-season and during the actual season is the amount of fun the online community has just waiting for the next episode. People take the time to watch it two or three times, looking for small details, making informed predictions about what would come next, and discussing it at large. A week can be both a very long and very short amount of time.
What this is all boiling down to is are we in such an on-demand world, a world of instant gratification, that a week really is torture to wait between episodes of a beloved show? Is this now the beginning of the end of television as a weekly format? We have already seen in recent years the ongoing switch to on-demand and mobile app being the preferred methods of consuming TV. That’s how I watched most of my TV this past year. But that is rather different than Netflix’s method of releasing all of their episodes of original content at the same time.
If releasing all episodes in one go became the norm, I think the world of fandoms would suffer a little bit. Even water cooler chatting would be different. It would be the end of “so how about Game of Thrones last night?”. Not everyone would have watched all the episodes at the same time, so then we come back to the discussion of spoilers and having to avoid the Internet for a time. Even though it is clear we live in a world of instant gratification, that does not mean we have to continue it. It is good to slow down and let things take their time. Good things come to those who wait, or something like that.
