Game of Thrones
Stop watching after: Season 4
Total number of seasons: 8
If you are considering watching Game of Thrones, it is very likely that you are already aware the show doesn’t end well. Even though the last season got the most criticism, the quality of the writing in the series started deteriorating much earlier than that. By the end of the fourth season, there was not much left in terms of book material and the show creators took full control. That is also when the author of the book series, George R. R. Martin, became much less involved with the show. The unfortunate result was that Game of Thrones became almost a caricature of itself: shocking but logical plot twists were replaced with meaningless confusing ones, the smartest characters stopped making any sense, and the political intrigues made way for soapy plot lines.
According to Grunge (warning: spoilers in the full article),
…the subplots that played out in season five’s exotic new location sum up everything that Game of Thrones has turned into: they were slow, confusing and barely plausible. If the rest of GoT is going to be as underwhelming as the arrival of the long-awaited band of Sand Snakes, then the cast and crew might as well pack up and go home now.
Unfortunately, the rest was even worse.
According to Lindsay Ellis (warning: spoilers in the full video),
…Game of Thrones took a sharp dive in quality after season 4. Some have blamed that on the show running out of source material, others have said as much as the lack of interesting new characters as all your faves were rapidly dying off (which they weren’t really in the books… whatever). I’m not here for that. So what really changed? Well as I see it, there were two main storytelling component shifts. One: that characters, let’s take for instance Tyrion, who are defined by their intelligence and ability to read the writing on the wall as far as Westerosi politics go, suddenly had to take a whole bunch of stupid pills in order for the plot to get where it needed to be. And number two: where in earlier seasons, the plot was highly motivated by the social trends of its fictional world, […] the show completely opted to ignore them in later seasons because it was simply inconvenient to the plot.
