HBO’s Game of Thrones turned 15 years old last month, and it’s understandably got folks feeling nostalgic, including those who worked on it.
On Bluesky, writer Bryan Cogman looked back on his experience writing for the show when it was in its infancy. His first episode was season one’s fourth, “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things,” which itself is now 15 as of this weekend. Back when Thrones was first shot in 2009, he’d served as the “in-house ‘expert’” who created accessible documents for family trees, characters, and the like. That work led to him helping showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss break the season, and later landed him writing duties on that episode, which he thought at the time was just a simple training exercise.
I wasn’t going to participate in the whole #GoT15 thing, cuz… well, I don’t work for HBO anymore (haha) but I owe the show and its fans so much, I thought I’d post a bit about the first episode I wrote – 104: ‘Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things’… which premiered 15 years ago today… (cont)
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— Bryan Cogman (@bryancogman.bsky.social) May 8, 2026 at 11:20 AM
In the lengthy thread, Cogman discusses the episode’s shooting process and one of his favorite moments in getting to visualize Bran Stark’s dreams. Some may remember Game of Thrones as HBO’s first foray into genre television, and as such, the team and network were skittish about going all in on those fantasy elements. (He even called Thrones “scrappy” compared to other then-running shows on the network like Boardwalk Empire.) Despite “a lot of pressure” to tamp that down, he said “fuck it, I’ll write it anyway” and came up with a version of the dream that was “not too fantastical, but enough to see where we were going.”
At this point in his career, Cogman had no writing experience and hoped to become a staff writer for the show in later seasons. But because Benioff and Weiss had been told by HBO to bring on freelancers, they picked him among that season one staff, a team that also included George R.R. Martin and longtime Buffy writer Jane Espenson. While extremely grateful to Benioff and Weiss for taking a chance on him, Cogman also credited HBO’s environment back then, when “creatives and execs truly felt like collaborators.” The episode’s shooting was also his unofficial first go as an on-set producer. It was a role Weiss and Benioff wanted for Cogman, and one he later officially graduated to while still writing for future seasons.
Cogman’s now a consulting producer on Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, and considers Thrones his “film school [that] spoiled me for life. I learned everything I know about writing and production from being in its trenches. GoT was very close to not happening in the early days for multiple reasons. Ultimately, it was a case of the right people being there to do it, the network taking a chance on us and the material, and the world wanting it. […] So, Happy Birthday, Game of Thrones! What is Dead May Never Die.”
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