Monday, September 23, 2019

PRIMETIME EMMYS Bid “GAME OF THRONES” Goodbye with Concluding Awards


From its premiere on HBO close to a decade ago, in 2011, “Game of Thrones” has been primed and promoted to be a strong contender for television programming accolades. And the medieval fantasy series, created by D.B Weiss and Dave Benioff based on the books of George R. R. Martin, did not disappoint its mother network. It went to double-digit nominations at the Primetime Emmy Awards from its first season, and scored some impressive multiple wins over the years. This Sunday, the 71st Primetime Emmys would finally give its last awards to the show that concluded in May this year; while fewer in number now, they remain very notable achievements.

CNN reports that on this year’s Primetime Emmy Awards, which was held at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles just this September 22, the eight-season awarding campaign of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” came to an end, not with a bang, but a breeze. For while the show ended up with its most epic number of nominations yet – 32 which breaks the 1994 season of “NYPD Blue” that got 26 that year – it only ended up with two Emmys. At least one of them was its seventh and last Outstanding Drama Series, so that is that.

The sheer amount of nominations that “Thrones” got for its swan song seems to belie the fact that for many devoted followers of the conflict in Westeros, the eighth and final season was generally considered the weakest among them all. With only six episodes filled with a breakneck pace of storytelling and anticlimactic comeuppances of many antagonistic personages in the narrative, audiences were of the opinion that the Benioff-Weiss show-runner tandem were just looking to finish the show quickly. 

At least the Emmys ceremony understood the meaningfulness of the series’ TV farewell, thus they gathered representatives of the cast onstage flanking Tyrion Lannister actor Peter Dinklage, who won the only other 2019 Primetime Emmy for “Game of Thrones” as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. On their acceptance speech, Dave Benioff remarked that their success with the show was thanks to the original story woven from “the demented mind of George R. R. Martin;” he actually has yet to finish the last two books of the original novels that the series was based on.

When it comes to the most winning show however, Amazon Prime Video netted 4 Emmys for British comedy-drama “Fleabag,” followed by three awards from miniseries “Chernobyl,” also from HBO. Said network retains Primetime Emmy supremacy with nine awards from its various nominated shows, followed by 7 from Amazon Prime Video, 4 from Netflix, and two each from NBC and FX.

Image courtesy of Fox News

0 comments:

Post a Comment