'Game of Thrones' series review: Let's focus on the good times

***WARNING: SPOILERS FOR “GAMES OF THRONES,” BOTH THE BOOKS AND THE SHOW***

So, as it turns out, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss didn’t murder your grandmother, even if that’s how a lot of longtime fans felt following the eighth and final season of HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

In considering a sort of post-mortem examination of the show as a whole, I thought it was reasonable to wait until at least a week after the series finale, to give a little time for all of the smoking-hot takes — mine included — to cool back down.

A lot of digital space has been filled excoriating Benioff and Weiss’ decision to limit the final two seasons to only 13 total episodes. And that’s fair… until you consider that many of those episodes were essentially feature-film-length productions, certainly in scope if not in cost (the final season reportedly cost HBO upwards of $90 million, according to The Daily Beast).

I have to give a lot of credit to Benioff and Weiss for doing an excellent job adapting George R.R. Martin’s five novels into the first four-and-a-half seasons of the show. They took a sprawling medieval epic — one Martin says he wrote specifically because he was sick of limiting his imagination to TV-show-sized budgets — and condensed it down to one of the best shows of the prestige-television era, while still managing to keep many of the massive setpieces Martin probably considered un-filmable when he wrote them.

It’s pretty tough to argue with the first four seasons of the show. They’re a perfect blend of drama, fantasy, political intrigue, sex and violence. Martin was able to hold a mirror up to modern society’s messy cutthroat politics with the added bonus of the actual cutting of throats, thanks to his medieval setting.

There are missteps, to be sure, even in those early seasons. Despite a number of empowered female characters, there’s a nameless brothel prostitute or castle servant girl being horribly abused for every Dany or Arya. And the show managed to generate its own misogyny issues, adding unnecessary rape scenes on more than one occasion.

But to watch Tyrion Lannister cleverly ferret out Cersei’s snitch in season two, or to have your life ruined for several days following the Red Wedding in season three, was truly something.

There are a lot of ways to describe “Game of Thrones” to someone who’s never seen it. They include phrases like, “kind of ‘The Sopranos,’ but with dragons and swords” and “kind of like ‘Lord of the Rings’ but with less wizards and more nudity.”

But the truth is that just like when Martin’s novels were coming out, no one had really seen anything quite like “Game of Thrones” before. Its shocking violence (and equally shocking plot twists) and its insistence that there are no truly pure heroes or villains breathed new life into a genre that, quite honestly, no one was making movies or television shows about anymore.

Knight-and-dragon epics had pretty much gone the way of the Western as far as the small or big screen. Likely emboldened by the success of the “Lord of the Rings” films, HBO and early “Thrones” backers took a big risk and it paid off handsomely.

But for all of its lords, ladies, waifs, squires and sorceresses, the show dealt with familiar themes. Family. Honor. Sacrifice. What are people capable of in their pursuit of power? How do you make an impossible choice, and how does that decision affect the people around you?

You’ve got to hand it to both Martin and the showrunners. Their pilot episode culminated in brother-sister incest, with that brother pushing an adolescent boy out a tower window, presumably to his death.

The same show somehow managed to turn that incestuous brother into a sympathetic character (and a fan favorite!) and nearly into a hero before he made an unfortunate U-turn back to his old ways.

I’ve been mentioning George R.R. Martin a lot. That’s on purpose.

Because once Martin’s insanely detailed source material ran out (about three-quarters of the way through season five), “Game of Thrones” went from amazing television to pretty-great television.

Again, it’s tough to lay the blame solely at Benioff and Weiss’ feet. They had an entire universe of richly realized characters to draw on, and countless plotlines to pick and choose from. It’s not really fair to expect them to then create, in four years and change, what Martin spent more than a decade developing and fine-tuning.

Martin gave them a Cliff’s Notes version of the remaining “Song of Ice and Fire” story, and in a lot of ways it kind of feels like that’s what we got in the back half of the series’ run. Fan complaints about the show burning through plot felt symptomatic of a series that knew the big moments it wanted to hit, but didn’t quite have the plot structure for them to feel earned.

But a lot of great TV series have hiccups and missteps.

The show’s fifth season, despite largely being one big bummer after another, still had plenty of great moments. But it was one of the first times where “Thrones” was roundly criticized by large number of fans. The Ramsay Bolton era was awfully dark, wasn’t it?

Season six found the show getting its second wind, generating momentum by sending both Arya Stark and Daenerys Targeryen back home to Westeros, bringing back both Jon Snow and Sandor Clegane and staging the suffocating Battle of the Bastards as well as Cersei’s terrorist-style destruction of the Sept of Baelor.

Plenty has been written by now about the hurtling rush of the final two seasons. As I’ve said before, the real shame is that HBO didn’t want it to be that way. They would’ve been fine with “Thrones” continuing in perpetuity, I’m sure. But the showrunners chose, for whatever reason, to compress their already-compressed story further.

A bunch of hour-and-twenty-minute episodes weren’t necessary. Millions of people the world over were just fine with getting this story 58 minutes at a time. Watching Arya in a mini-episode of “The Walking Dead” was kind of cool, but it wasn’t crucial to “The Long Night” in any meaningful way. It was just sort of neat, which is probably the same reason we got a zombie polar bear in season seven.

So longtime “Thrones” fans have a choice. We can choose to focus on the good times, the first four seasons where it seemed like the show could do no wrong… or we can spend far too much time carping about the final seasons, when a group of writers less talented than George R.R. Martin did what they could with a rough outline of his story in a much shorter period of time than Martin himself was allotted.

Is it a shame that “Game of Thrones” wasn’t able to pull things together in a satisfying way at the end? Absolutely. But in an age when every media company is starting its own streaming service and Netflix is debuting a brand-new original show just about every week, it’s worth noting that we aren’t likely to see another series that captivates millions of people the way “Thrones” did.

We came to work on Mondays and couldn’t wait to talk about it, even when it wasn’t good. We got together with friends to sit down and watch. We recorded reaction videos that, quite honestly, launched the careers of more than a few YouTube content creators.

Martin’s idea to write a fantasy series that more accurately reflected the violent nature of the world became a worldwide phenomenon. He created a fictional universe that HBO and its subscribers appear more than happy to continue exploring through the various planned spinoff series.

It didn’t end the way I wanted. But quite frankly, I didn’t want it to end, so how could I have possibly been satisfied?

Click here for our final “Thrones’n’at” episode, taking a look at some of our favorite characters and moments from the series.