The Long Spite: Was the ‘Game of Thrones’ Finale the Most Hated Ever? - The Ringer

“Was it right?” Jon Snow asks Tyrion after assassinating Daenerys in the series finale of Game of Thrones. “What I did? What we did—it doesn’t feel right.”

“Ask me again in 10 years,” Tyrion responds.

IMDb users didn’t wait nearly that long to pass judgment on how Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss handled the denouement of their immensely successful HBO series. Immediately after the finale aired, visitors to the vast movie and TV database—or as Tyrion might call it, the keeper of all our stories—began rating the episode on a scale from 1 to 10. Their verdict on what D&D did: It wasn’t right.

Each of the final season’s six episodes has received more than 100,000 IMDb ratings. The average scores—especially for the second half of the season—are notably low not just by Game of Thrones’ previously lofty standards but compared to all oft-rated series on IMDb. Thrones’ user ratings were consistently strong throughout its first seven seasons, spiking in Season 4 and at the end of Season 6, but Season 8’s user ratings nose-dived more dramatically than the Clegane brothers amid the destruction of King’s Landing. Until recently, a fifth-season dalliance with Dorne had been the series’ nadir, but the six lowest-rated episodes in the series’ run are now all from the final season.

As of the Wednesday after the finale’s first airing, the average IMDb user score for “The Iron Throne” sits at 4.4. The average combined rating for the last six episodes is 6.7. Considering that the combined average for the series’ previous seven seasons was 9.1, that’s quite a comedown. In fact, the drastic differences between the average ratings for Thrones’ final season and episode and the show’s combined average rating for its previous seasons are almost unprecedented among popular shows.

For comparative purposes, we gathered episode-by-episode ratings for more than 1,600 shows with at least 5,000 user ratings on IMDb, which resulted in a sample of approximately 130,000 episodes over more than 7,400 seasons. The final season of Thrones places in the bottom 10 percent of all seasons in that group, and the series finale ranks within the worst 1.5 percent of all episodes. (It might seem strange that scores toward the middle of the 1–10 scale would rank so low, but IMDb user ratings tend to skew toward the high side, probably because users are more likely to rate shows they enjoy.)

The full dataset (filtered to remove game shows and series that are still airing) doesn’t offer any evidence of a pronounced tendency for shows to end in unsatisfying fashion. As the table below indicates, the average ratings for final seasons and earlier seasons are only about a tenth of a point apart (if that), and as we’ve noted before, series finales tend to be deemed better-than-average episodes. That’s true among shows that ran for at least two seasons and shows that ran for at least five seasons, and it’s also true for shows whose genre labels include “drama” and ran for at least five seasons.

Average IMDb User Ratings for Popular Non-Game Shows

Sample	Final Season	Other Seasons	Final Episode
Sample	Final Season	Other Seasons	Final Episode
≥2 Seasons	7.79	7.82	8.11
≥5 Seasons	7.64	7.75	8.02
≥5-Season Dramas	7.85	7.93	8.23

In other words, TV series don’t typically have much more trouble pulling off the proverbial landing than they do maintaining quality prior to that point. Thrones, which had the highest average “other seasons” rating of any series in the sample with as many total episodes, is one of the most extreme exceptions.

The following table lists the narrative, live-action series that ran for more than five seasons and experienced the biggest drop-offs from their previous seasons to their final seasons, as indicated by their final-season average divided by their other-seasons average. Game of Thrones, for instance, has a final-season average rating only 73.2 percent as high as the average rating of its earlier seasons.

Lowest-Rated Final Seasons (Relative to Combined Previous Seasons)

Series	Number of Seasons	Final Season Ranking	Other Seasons Ranking	Final Season %
Series	Number of Seasons	Final Season Ranking	Other Seasons Ranking	Final Season %
House of Cards	6	4.18	8.62	48.4
Game of Thrones	8	6.67	9.11	73.2
Two and a Half Men	12	5.55	7.56	73.5
Murphy Brown	11	5.01	6.72	74.5
Scrubs	9	6.37	8.35	76.3
Bewitched	8	5.82	7.54	77.3
Degrassi: The Next Generation	14	5.08	6.5	78.2
Are You Afraid of the Dark?	7	6.98	8.7	80.2
Laverne & Shirley	8	6.35	7.67	82.8
Hawaii Five-O	12	6.08	7.28	83.6

Some of these outlier last seasons suffered from circumstances that went beyond a simple decline in quality. House of Cards, the only qualifying show with a steeper decline than Thrones, booted lead actor Kevin Spacey from the final season in the wake of sexual assault allegations by dozens of accusers and elevated Robin Wright to the starring role. The low ratings for House of Cards Season 6 could be a product of trolls trying to sabotage the series to protest Spacey’s removal; IMDb has been plagued by similar problems in the past. It’s possible, though, that the ratings are partly a response to the awkward narrative necessity of killing the main character off-screen. The ratings for the roundly lambasted series finale do show a lower average score by male users, but even female users gave it a 3.9. (The Thrones finale ratings show no gender split, although the site’s most prolific voters gave the episode a relatively positive score of 6.7.)

Scrubs essentially rebooted in its final season, replacing almost its entire cast, while Bewitched recycled scripts from earlier episodes. Thrones itself had to resolve a sprawling story that started as an adaptation but ran out of road map when the series surpassed its source material. The accelerated pace at which the showrunners tried to tie up—or, just as often, didn’t try to tie up—the show’s complex plot lines culminated in the IMDb audience treating the finale like Drogon did the Iron Throne. Only a few other finales—including legendarily divisive endings like those of Dexter and How I Met Your Mother—occupy the same range relative to their series’ previous scores. (Both the best qualifying final season and the best qualifying finale belong to Breaking Bad, at 9.3 and 9.9, respectively; other user-acclaimed finales include Parenthood at 9.8; Six Feet Under, 9.8; Person of Interest, 9.8; and, at 9.7, The Americans, Angel, Friends, Parks and Recreation, Friday Night Lights, and The Office. In happier news for HBO, Veep’s series finale score stands at 9.6.)

Lowest-Rated Final Episodes (Relative to Combined Non-Final Seasons)

Series	Number of Seasons	Final Episode Rating	Other Seasons Rating	Final Episode %
Series	Number of Seasons	Final Episode Rating	Other Seasons Rating	Final Episode %
Are You Afraid of the Dark?	7	1.8	8.7	20.7
House of Cards	6	2.7	8.62	31.3
Game of Thrones	8	4.4	9.11	48.3
Dexter	8	4.7	8.75	53.7
Two and a Half Men	12	4.1	7.56	54.3
The Andy Griffith Show	8	4.8	7.91	60.7
True Blood	7	5.2	8.21	63.3
Murphy Brown	11	4.5	6.72	66.9
How I Met Your Mother	9	5.6	8.26	67.8
Pretty Little Liars	7	5.6	8.23	68.1

That Thrones’ user ratings fell through the Moon Door in its final season is partly a testament to its quality, consistency, and audience engagement leading up to that point; 4s, 5s, and 6s wouldn’t be as jarring if not for the 9s that came before. And even as the endgame left many fans unfulfilled, Thrones remained a massive success in the kind of ratings that matter more to HBO.

Of course, IMDb user ratings are only a proxy for quality; they tell us how good a show is perceived to be by users of the site, not necessarily how good it is in any objective sense. What’s more, in many cases IMDb users may not be representative of the series’ overall audience. Thrones Season 8 has been savaged on social media, endlessly dissected by writers who watched it in a more analytical way than most casual viewers, found wanting by betrayed book readers who couldn’t help comparing it to George R.R. Martin’s intricate work, and even slighted by several members of the cast. A petition to remake Season 8 with “competent writers” has received upward of 1.5 million signatures (although they may not all be unique), and at least one writer has taken on the task of scripting an alternate telling. It’s reasonable to assume that IMDb raters are much more aware of—and potentially influenced by—that backlash than the less Extremely Online spectators who make up the majority of the giant audience enthralled by Thrones.

In the same way that the electorate on Twitter doesn’t always mirror the electorate in real life, then, the IMDb audience probably distorts the more sweeping sentiment to a certain extent—although the critics aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes were almost equally harsh in their pans of the second half of the season. Even if there isn’t a concerted campaign to tank the Thrones ratings by a subset of inordinately aggrieved fans, the ultralow rating for the finale in particular likely reflects the IMDb audience’s dissatisfaction with the season as a whole (unless a lot of viewers were really bitter about that water bottle). Until we have representative public polling on every episode of past and present TV shows, as we do with political candidates, more reliable data sources are scarce.

Judging by the data we do have, though, there may be one thing in the world more powerful than a good story—a deeply invested audience’s anger about a good story squandered. Then again, the wounds inflicted on the fan base’s psyche over the last several weeks haven’t had time to heal. Future viewers may reappraise the season, although it would take an inordinate number of positive votes to counteract the negative ones already cast. Was the way Thrones ended right? For now and for the foreseeable future, the internet’s answer is a vehement no. We can ask IMDb again in 10 years.

Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.

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https://www.theringer.com/game-of-thrones/2019/5/23/18636692/season-8-iron-throne-imdb-ratings-worst-tv-finale-ever

2019-05-23 10:20:00Z
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