Game of Thrones season 5 was a bit of a disaster, if you look at it from the perspective of the books. It left out huge characters like Arianne Martell, changed major, major story arcs, and vastly simplified motivations for characters like Cersei. And I’m starting to think that means that George R. R. Martin was right all along… the books are unfilmable. The show has been, for most of its run, everything we could possibly hope for, but at this point in the story, it’s left the books behind, because it can’t handle them anymore.

Game of Thrones Proves That Game of Thrones Is Unfilmable

A Song of Ice and Fire was written to be unfilmable. That was always the intent. George R. R. Martin worked in Hollywood once upon a time, and always found it frustrating that the best parts of his scripts got cut. His stories lost their complexity. When he left, he left with grand plans. As he told EW back in 2011, “I said, ‘I’m sick of this, I’m going to write something that’s as big as I want it to be, and it’s going to have a cast of characters that go into the thousands, and I’m going to have huge castles, and battles, and dragons.” The story wasn’t limited with the idea of making it into a film. He didn’t have to cut anything. He could have characters whose name started with the same letter—or two characters named Robert! Madness!

For a long time, Martin ruled out the possibility of films, although he admitted that maybe—maybe—HBO could do the series justice. Of course, that’s what ended up happening. The first four seasons of Game of Thrones are amazing, some of the best television ever. Of course, they did streamline and simplify the books, sometimes a lot, but they generally kept to the spirit, not to mention the storyline, of Martin’s novels.

That is no longer true. In season 5, the Meereenese Knot struck back, and the ever increasing number of characters finally overwhelmed the show. It cost Martin nothing to add amazing characters like Arianne and the Greyjoys and Lady Stoneheart and dozens of others. But every one of those would cost the HBO production a big sum of money, and would require more explanation for a TV audience that network executives somehow still believes is too dumb.

Now, they’ve streamlined too far, and they’ve changed the story dramatically—in part because Winds of Winter isn’t out yet, which was perceived as a problem way back when the show first came out. And the series’ unfilmability is back. There are too many characters, too many places, too complex motivations. It doesn’t work for ten hours of television anymore.

Could Game of Thrones have been saved? Or, rather, could it have remained as popular as it is without dramatically changing the books? I don’t think it could have in its current form. A simple change to twelve or fourteen episodes and a few million more dollars, though, would have made all the difference. A few more hours for a story that is vastly larger in scope than it used to be is fully merited.

But HBO apparently thought that wasn’t possible. And even now the story is still going to get more complex, even as its vision narrows in Winds of Winter. Ultimately, the series—at least the back half of it—was unfilmable, not by its very nature, but because HBO stopped going all-in. And Game of Thrones, from the book fan’s point of view, has suffered for it.