Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and action.

Hello, and welcome back to what went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone not a movie at all, but a sprawling fantasy series that maybe sprawled a little too hard by the end.

But today, we're going to focus on where it all began.

I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here, as always, with Chris Winnerbauer.

And Chris, what do you have for us today?

But da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da That's right. We have Game of Thrones, the pilot, which, if you think about it, from a budgetary and scheduling perspective, was basically a well-budgeted independent film.

And it had a notoriously troubled production.

I am sure that our listeners have heard vague rumblings, rumors of troubled sets and far-off lands.

And today we're going to get to the details and learn to separate fact from fiction, myth from man. Lizzie, I'm assuming you had seen

Game of Thrones before. What were your thoughts upon watching and or rewatching this seminal? And I

use that word specifically, episode of television for the podcast. Well, first of all, I am very excited to talk about this. I don't know a ton about the production of the pilot outside of, you know, I know some people were recast. It's about all I know. So going in pretty blind, purposely did not look up stuff ahead of this. So I can't wait to hear what you have to tell us. Yes, of course, I have seen Game of Thrones. I've seen the pilot. This came out, what year did this come out? 2011. 2011. Okay. So we had like just graduated college. This was a big deal. This was like I felt like this is one of the first shows that I owned as an adult, if that makes sense. It was yours. It's mine. It's mine. My own. My precious. There it is. And I was excited to watch the pilot

again. I put it on. God, it's really good. It's really, really good. It's almost a bummer because the show

ultimately fails to deliver, I think, on the level of entertainment that it sets up in the first episode. There's even

some things in the first episode that, you know, appear to be clues that may return later that I

don't think ever come back. But it's just, it's so good. And it's one of those things where

there's almost no recognizable faces in this. There's Sean Bean, of course, which I know we're going to

talk about. And then to a certain extent, Peter Dinklage, but even Peter Dinklage, not super well

known prior to this show. I really like that. And I wish that more shows, particularly

ensemble pieces, cough, cough, knives out, would go that route because not having recognizable faces allows me to

enter the world and enter the story immediately without many preconceived notions at all.

It's just great. I can't wait to hear more about it. I forgot how good Nikolai Koster Waldow is.

He's very charming. That is such a shocking reveal at the end of the first episode. And also,

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