Anish Moonka@anishmoonka
HBO told Benioff and Weiss they could have unlimited budget and as many episodes as they wanted for two more seasons of Game of Thrones. They said no. They wanted to write Star Wars instead. The same thing breaks every big show's final season.
The longer a show runs, the smaller its writing team and creative attention get, while the budget grows to make up for it. Game of Thrones seasons 1 to 6 each had 10 episodes. Season 7 dropped to 7. Season 8 dropped to 6. Benioff and Weiss said they couldn't make 10 episodes in the show's usual 12 to 14 month schedule. They had also run out of George R.R. Martin's books to adapt after season 5. Three months after the finale aired, they signed a $200M deal with Netflix to start making new shows.
Stranger Things shows the same thing happening at Netflix. Season 4 cost $30M per episode. Season 5 jumped to between $50M and $60M per episode, putting the final season's price tag at $400M to $480M. But across seasons 4 and 5, the show released fewer than three episodes per year on average. The kids on screen grew into adults while everyone waited.
Behind both shows is a writing system that quietly broke. Old TV shows had teams of 10 to 12 writers working on 22 episodes per year. Streaming shrank that down to "mini-rooms" of three or four writers handling six to ten episodes. Less than half the size. And because streaming services drop every episode at once, all the scripts have to be locked before filming starts. So if a storyline isn't working partway through, there's no way to fix it.
Lost is the older version. Damon Lindelof wanted to end the show after three seasons but ABC refused with "you don't end shows people are watching." So the writers spent three extra years inventing answers to mysteries they had not actually planned. Then the 2007 writers' strike cut a season short and the finale had to absorb the damage.
The attention problem at the top makes everything worse. Netflix gave Ryan Murphy $300M for 10 new shows in five years. Studios now buy big creators across multiple projects at once, which means the person who built your favorite show is often half-checked-out by the time the finale gets made.
Early seasons get the full creative team, a cast on their first cheap contracts, and books or comics to adapt. Final seasons get a half-distracted creator, a three-person writing team, scripts that can't be changed, a $400M budget, and a star whose per-episode pay is now ten times higher. By the final season, the budget is doing what good writing used to do for free.
