Game of Thrones producers on their hope for the show's legacy 

The fifth season of HBO’s epic thriller averaged 19.1 million viewers per episode when including all forms of viewership (streaming, DVR playback, repeats). That’s currently tied with last season and will continue to rise over the coming weeks. 

showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, who hope to cap their worldwide hit at roughly seven seasons, what their hope was for the show’s eventual legacy. 

“It would be nice if people kept watching it,” Weiss said. “The idea is to tell a unified story that’s 70-odd hours long and do that successfully. It’s something I would love for my kids to be able to appreciate someday – thought it might be traumatic for them to see it.”

 to become one of those titles like 1982’s comedy

] 20 years from now and going, ‘Look, that’s a young Aflie Allen,’ or ‘That’s a young Sophie Turner’ – where so many actors started such great careers,” Benioff said. “It would be really fun on a personal level to know we had a helping hand in launching them, as well as other actors who aren’t so young that we still gave a boost.”

The sixth season of the series begins production in July. Unlike previous seasons, where fans of George R.R. Martin’s novels knew most of the show’s major plot twists, the series is expected to extend into unknown story territory (unless Martin publishes his upcoming novel,

, before next spring). Weiss noted there’s a silver lining in this potential reversal of the usual way the narrative of

“I’d like to think the unpredictability of the show relative to the books where sometimes the show cleaves to the books and sometimes it departs from the books creates a kind of separate-if-obviously-very-closely-related universe that can coexist,” Weiss said. “You can’t dictate people’s reactions but I hope there’s an element of surprise introduced into the show’s narrative that makes it exciting for both people who read the books and people who watch the show and haven’t read the books yet.” 

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