Game of Thrones is over. Is that so bad?

GAME OF THRONES FANS HAVE WITNESSED countless deaths in its final season, but the show’s most painful casualty is yet to come. As Netflix firehoses content and streaming services keep emerging to spin media giants’ intellectual property into gold, critics like me have been fretting over the slow demise of television as mass cultural event. That panic has crystallized around Thrones—a series that remains both hugely popular and acclaimed at a time when ratings and prestige sometimes seem mutually exclusive.

This kind of consensus hit can be really healthy for a society as fragmented as ours. Divided by class, politics and identity, 43 million of us can at least come together to watch Thrones. If fantasy buffs, academics, proponents of Strong Female Characters, the Gay of Thrones recappers, Black Twitter, Barack Obama, J. Lo, Tom Brady and Beyoncé are all losing their minds over the