By Last year Game of Thrones actor Liam Cunningham revealed that one moving speech from season 7 took on a special resonance because it was filmed the morning after the U.S. election result.
Filming for season 8 is due to wrap soon, and with political unrest consuming America it's understandable that producers are mindful of how this might affect the mindset of viewers.
Speaking at a panel discussion for the upcoming series The 2000s: A Look Back at the Dawn of TV’s New Golden Age, Game of Thrones Executive Producer and former HBO President Carolyn Strauss admitted, “There’s a totally different consciousness in the mind of viewers and the mind of the people who are buying the shows.”
“We need a laugh,” added Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan. He went on to say that black and white 'good' or 'bad' characters have been in decline with the rise of the anti-hero, but that now perhaps “it’s time for heroes again.”
“The truth is none of us are all good or all bad,” Strauss explained, “We move from dark to light… I think all of us at HBO are attracted to the grey areas.”
“Real people are various shades of grey,” Gilligan said. “We all have good and bad that are contained within us.”
“I don’t know that we can ever go back to the characters that are all good or all bad, but maybe around the corner are more characters who are flawed, who work very hard to do the right thing and who want to be good, even when they’re not,” he said.
