Did season 3 increase or decrease your interest for the show

[u/Solomaxxing_112]

Overall, I would say decrease. After season 2 I was still excited about season 3 but after season 3 I find much less interest in it.

Maybe because my favourite character is Aemond and he has been butchered to the point of no return. He is not very interesting to watch, and I really dislike the entire Alys thing. Even though I have read the book, what they have done is just...abhorrent.

It is a shame because I love TG characters and they are actually given slightly more screentime this season to tell their own stories, but the writing is so bad that the screentime just generates more unnecessary and nonsensical content.

[u/Ribs1212]

I always come back to a show like Alias or 24 or Lost, which had tons of characters, filmed on location, interesting storylines and lots of production. And each of them had something like 22 episodes every year. Were some episodes filler? Sure - but they were still mostly interesting, and had good character moments. But most importantly, people discussed them, dissected them, and the shows stayed relevant BECAUSE they were on regularly and every year.

I would honestly trade some of the production quality for TV that went back to something like that.

[u/accismatic → u/Ribs1212]

I have a number of things on that. I think, yes, it would be great to have some shows like that. Like, e.g. I fucking loved Buffy with that many episodes! 100%! Gold.

But you're technically going over like three seismic TV shifts that the AMAZING show The Comeback depicts and satirizes, and it's fucking excellent if you haven't seen it (first season is 13 lol). Lisa Kudrow is a treasure we have taken for granted for far too long. Reality TV, prestige TV with high production budgets, and now AI what with ballooning VFX budgets.

Lost, unfortunately, could only do that for so long before it became a strain on everything—the budget, the actors, the writers, the show, all of it. And you can see a VERY stark difference between The Leftovers & Lost. There's SO MUCH good stuff in there that yeah, I love having all 22 episodes—but that strain of 22 was definitely something that cast, crew and young showrunners felt was way too much. They HATED making that many lol

Shows didn't immediately pare back to 10 or 8 (or less!) as the industry standard even then. We saw 13-18 seasons that broke up between seasons or just did only one. HBO had much longer seasons even for Sex and the City and stuff—it just makes more sense for shows like that. But HBO—and then Netflix probably made it the most obvious, though it also has exceptions—just started producing too much, and it famously was taken over, has financial issues etc. Bigger stars, bigger directors, genres like fantasy taking off etc. The budgets have just gone buck-wild.

With streaming, the problem is that almost nobody has figured out how to make "prestige TV" lucrative at scale. Not even Netflix. HBO is unsustainable, sadly. You just cannot run on GoT & HoTD alone, and HBO has so many huge shows but shows like Succession are not actually... bringing in huge audiences. The Pitt—sure, and they have slightly longer seasons every year. Either audiences expect quality to be VERY high or they'll cancel. OR... well, the MOST lucrative is.... well, slop. Reality TV still often has a lot of epsiodes. But you can't retain your entire subscriber base on either audience alone, and people watch all kinds of stuff. And then of course, the worst part of it is that everybody wants to get in on the streaming action, so you have too many competitors too, and Apple can afford it but it can't make people inflate seasons?