The Television Academy counts 59 Primetime Emmy Awards for Game of Thrones, from 159 nominations, which is more than it has given any other drama.1 A petition asking HBO to remake the show's last season with different writers has collected 1,864,968 signatures.2
Both of those belong to the same eight seasons. Westeros is three shows now, with one prequel finishing its own season this month and another that ran over the winter, and the original is still the one being argued about. This site files it under fifteen separate headings.
Game of Thrones is the most decorated drama television has made and the one whose own audience asked for its last season back; every ranking here is about one of those two shows.
Game of Thrones vs Breaking Bad: 64 shows, one slot
The widest question here drops Game of Thrones into a field of 64 series, stretching back to MAS*H and forward through The Last of Us.
Its case is scale. Eight seasons, 73 episodes, and a final run watched by more than ten million people an episode above whatever season seven managed.3
Breaking Bad makes the opposite case. Sixteen Emmys from 58 nominations across five seasons, and an ending nobody has ever petitioned to have redone.4
The Sopranos, The Wire and Twin Peaks are all here too, and their presence exposes what "best ever" quietly rewards: a show that never had a bad year.
HBO's own shelf, where The Sopranos got there first
Narrow the field to one network and eighteen HBO originals remain.
Game of Thrones is the commercial peak of that shelf. Its finale broke a single-telecast record The Sopranos had held at HBO since 2002.3
The Sopranos holds the critical position. Twenty-one Emmys from 112 nominations, and the credit for inventing the format that every other show on this list works inside.5
Succession, The Wire, Chernobyl and Six Feet Under fill out the rest. HBO has enough of these that its in-house shortlist is harder to settle than most networks' all-time one.
Game of Thrones vs House of the Dragon: sharing a genre with your own prequel
In the fantasy-television ranking the show meets sixteen rivals and one of them is its own prequel.
House of the Dragon returned on 21 June 2026 and finishes its eight-episode third season on 9 August.6 It is not even the only Westeros series to air in 2026: the winter prequel took six Sundays in January and February.7
Fantasy television has a thinner bench than its reputation suggests. The Witcher, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Rings of Power and Avatar: The Last Airbender are the serious names, and none of them ran for as long.
This is the category where Game of Thrones is least contested, for a circular reason. It is the show that made networks commission the others.
The 2010s, from Fleabag to a dragon budget
Cut the field down to a single decade and the show's own run, 2011 to 2019, fits inside it exactly.
So does almost everything else worth arguing about. Breaking Bad finished in 2013, Mad Men in 2015, Fleabag ran two series and stopped, and Better Call Saul, Atlanta, Chernobyl and Succession all began.
Game of Thrones was the decade's last genuine appointment: a drama a very large audience watched at the same hour on the same night rather than whenever it suited them.
That is a claim about distribution, not quality, and putting it in an eighteen-show field is what makes the difference visible.
Shogun, Bridgerton and the adaptation that ran out of book
Every show on the adaptation list started as a novel. One of them overtook its source.
Game of Thrones caught up with George R.R. Martin in 2016 and wrote its last two seasons without him.
Shogun had all of James Clavell's 1975 novel to work from. The Queen's Gambit had Walter Tevis. Normal People had Sally Rooney. Bridgerton has more Julia Quinn books than Netflix has seasons.
The comparison is unusually clean here, because the part of Game of Thrones readers complain about is precisely the part with no book underneath it.
A Song of Ice and Fire has been unfinished since 2011
On the epic-fantasy shelf the entry is the books rather than the show, and the books are a different case entirely.
A Dance with Dragons, the fifth novel, was published on 12 July 2011.8 The Winds of Winter has not followed. Fifteen years have passed, which is longer than the television series took to start, run and finish.
Martin said in a January 2026 interview that he is still writing it, with a reported 1,100 manuscript pages done and no publication date, and listed the other books he owes first.9
Tolkien delivered his trilogy in full by 1955, and it shares this shelf. The Wheel of Time is finished, all fourteen volumes. The Kingkiller Chronicle is the other famous incomplete saga, and that is company nobody chooses.
For readers this is the entire case: the series that reshaped modern fantasy is the one you cannot finish.
Tyrion Lannister vs Arya Stark: the argument moves indoors
One ranking makes Game of Thrones the whole question and sets 21 of its own characters against each other.
Peter Dinklage won four Emmys as Tyrion Lannister from nine nominations, the last in 2019, and no supporting actor in a drama has more.10
Arya Stark carries the most-replayed moment of the final season. Ned Stark has the death that told 2011 viewers the show meant it. The Hound, Tywin, Brienne, Varys and Oberyn Martell all have constituencies of their own.
A show with 21 defensible answers to "who was the best character" has a bench, and the bench is the part nobody disputes.
Season 4 against Season 8
Eight options, and most people arrive knowing which one they came to vote against.
Season 4 is the traditional answer. The Purple Wedding, Tyrion's trial and the Battle of Castle Black all landed in ten episodes in 2014.
Season 8 is six episodes long, and it is the season the remake petition was written about.2 It was also, by some distance, the most-watched: HBO put the season at 44.2 million viewers an episode in gross audience.3
Those two numbers describe the same six hours. The audience grew while the goodwill collapsed, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.
Season 1 keeps the viewers who preferred the show when it was about succession politics rather than dragons, and their case gets stronger every time somebody rewatches the pilot.
Ramin Djawadi's cello against sixty years of American television
The theme-song ranking runs sixteen deep and reaches back to Star Trek in 1966.
Ramin Djawadi wrote the Game of Thrones main title in 2011, which makes it one of the two newest pieces in the field.
The Addams Family, Cheers, Hawaii Five-O and The Muppet Show share an advantage the cello line does not have: you can sing them from memory, and most Americans over thirty can.
The Westeros map, judged as design
The title sequence is a separate craft from the music, and Game of Thrones did more than most to keep people watching credits instead of skipping them.
Its clockwork map rebuilt itself each week to show only the locations that episode visited, so the credits carried information rather than decoration.
Mad Men's falling adman, True Detective's double exposures, Severance's nested animation and The Sopranos' drive out of the Lincoln Tunnel are the competition. All four do something the map does not: they tell you about a person.
Joffrey Baratheon vs Gustavo Fring: three villains from one show
Three of the eighteen greatest television villains came out of Westeros: Joffrey Baratheon, Cersei Lannister and Ramsay Bolton.
Joffrey's cruelty is adolescent and petty, which is harder to sit through than competence, and Jack Gleeson plays it without ever asking to be liked.
Gustavo Fring is the opposite species. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul spent eleven seasons between them on a man whose menace depends entirely on never raising his voice.
Cersei outlasts nearly everyone who underestimates her. Walter White, Homelander and Tony Soprano appear here as well, and between them they say where television now puts its villains: mostly in the lead role.
Emilia Clarke has five other roles
Six options, one of which is Daenerys Targaryen across all eight seasons.
The others are Louisa Clark in Me Before You, Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys, Qi'ra in Solo, and two smaller parts.
Nowhere else does the show's gravity show up so plainly: a decade-long role in a global hit, set against a filmography that has not found another one.
Pedro Pascal: seven episodes as Oberyn Martell
Oberyn Martell arrives in season four and dies in it.
That was 2014, before Pedro Pascal was a lead in anything. He has since carried Narcos, The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, and joined Gladiator II and the Fantastic Four.
Set against Joel Miller and Din Djarin, a supporting turn from one season of somebody else's show is the smallest entry on his list.
It is also the one that got him the others, which no ranking can measure and readers will argue about regardless.
The 15 best HBO finales, and the one Game of Thrones supplied
HBO has fifteen series finales worth ranking, and Game of Thrones supplied the most-watched of them by a wide margin.
HBO's own press office put "The Iron Throne" at 19.3 million viewers across its platforms in May 2019, 13.6 million of them on the 9 p.m. broadcast, which remains the largest single telecast in the network's history.3
The Sopranos cut to black mid-scene. Six Feet Under flashed forward through every main character's death. The Leftovers ended on a story told across a kitchen table. Barry and Succession both stuck their landings in the 2020s.
Those are the endings this particular list exists to celebrate, which is why the show's appearance among them reads differently from every other section here.
Lost vs Game of Thrones: invert the question
The last ranking asks which television finale disappointed the most, and it is the one category where the show has an easy case to make.
Lost is the historical benchmark. Six seasons of accumulated questions, answered in 2010 with a reunion in a church.
It has strong competition. Dexter faked his death and became a lumberjack. How I Met Your Mother undid nine seasons of setup in twenty minutes. St. Elsewhere revealed that six years of hospital drama had happened inside a boy's snow globe.
Game of Thrones arrives carrying a number none of them have. Nearly 1.9 million people signed a petition asking for the season to be made again, and it was still gathering signatures three years later.2
Television's most decorated drama and its most formally complained-about ending come from the same show, which is the strangest fact on this page.
Fifteen questions, one show
Every ranking above contains Game of Thrones, and each one asks about something else entirely. The books, the theme, the villains, the season count and the ending each produce a different show, and the only point they agree on is that it belongs in the room.
None of those orders was handed down by anybody. Each came out of a bracket rather than a committee, which is how one show ends up filed five ways.
Anyone who thinks another series is filed under more headings than this one has a ranking to build.
More rankings, more angles
- The Simpsons: 800 Episodes, 17 Different Lists — a sitcom, an animation, a theme tune
- Star Trek Turns 60. No Two Lists Agree Where It Belongs — six decades of television, no fixed genre
- The Lord of the Rings Changes Category From List to List — the fantasy saga that shares a ranking here
Sources
- Television Academy — Game of Thrones awards record (59 Emmys, 159 nominations): televisionacademy.com (checked 2026-08-04)
- Change.org — "Remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers", signature count: change.org (checked 2026-08-04)
- HBO/Cinemax PR — Game of Thrones series finale viewership and season 8 average: medium.com/hbo-cinemax-pr (checked 2026-08-04)
- Television Academy — Breaking Bad awards record (16 Emmys, 58 nominations): televisionacademy.com (checked 2026-08-04)
- Television Academy — The Sopranos awards record (21 Emmys, 112 nominations): televisionacademy.com (checked 2026-08-04)
- Forbes — House of the Dragon season 3 schedule, premiere 21 June and finale 9 August 2026: forbes.com (checked 2026-08-04)
- TheWrap — A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode schedule, 18 January to 22 February 2026: thewrap.com (checked 2026-08-04)
- Penguin Random House — A Dance with Dragons, hardcover publication date 12 July 2011: penguinrandomhouse.com (checked 2026-08-04)
- AOL — George R.R. Martin's January 2026 remarks on The Winds of Winter: aol.com (checked 2026-08-04)
- Television Academy — Peter Dinklage, four Emmy wins from nine nominations: televisionacademy.com (checked 2026-08-04)