You know GoT is my favourite TV show (except maybe for The Simpsons golden age) and that I'll defend the later seasons on here, but the likes of Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Hannibal, The Sopranos, The Leftovers, Deadwood, The Handmaid's Tale, The West Wing, and even shows like Orange is the New Black, have strong cases to be considered "better quality". Love the show as I do, I think there's been a wee bit of revisionism about the first 4-6 seasons, which were full of plot problems and contrivances - they were just overlooked, either because it was GRRM's vision or because it was building towards something. Seasons 1-6 pulled stunts that seasons 7 & 8 would have been destroyed for, but they're looked back on as this super-clever, super-serious, super-nuanced, super-airtight story, when it was never that?
To me it was always campy and soapy, always full of contrivances, always more about set-up and pay-off, always about being transgressive and provocative, always about setting up moments rather than meticulously weaving a beautiful path towards them. Of course, those soap-opera elements and contrivances got louder and louder (and in some cases, more ridiculous) towards the end. It became so dedicated to delivering moments that it compressed too many into shorter spaces, which meant it became too plot-heavy and lost portions of the elegance it did have. But maybe that's why I found it easier to tolerate as the show gradually changed? I never loved GoT because I expected super-prestige, character-focused, super-artful drama that Mad Men, Better Call Saul, etc. went for, I loved it because it was pulpy, sexy, exciting, provocative, and really melodramatic. "Tits and dragons", you might say, if you were being uncharitable.
Its true strengths were always either technical (how immersive the world was, how impressive the battles and dragons looked), linked to the source material (the richness of the world and the characters, the danger of daring to love the characters), or setting up, and then delivering, massive spectacles - even small-scale events like Ned's death or the Red Wedding were treated with all the overblown drama of something like Battle of the Bastards or The Long Night. That's not to say the dialogue of the first 4/5 seasons didn't have me round its finger, and that's not to say that it lost some of its subtlety, incisiveness, and intrigue as it went along, but a perfect prestige TV show it never was. It was a horny fantasy melodrama hidden inside something that only appeared to be cleverer and more ruthless than it actually was.
