Emmys 2019: ‘Game of Thrones’ Final Season Wins Outstanding Drama Series

The final season of Game of Thrones was controversial with fans and critics, but the show was triumphant Sunday night at the 2019 Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles by winning the Outstanding Drama Series award. Before Sunday night, the show earned a record-breaking 32 nominations for the six-episode finale. It previously won 10 Emmys at the Creative Arts Awards last weekend.

The other nominees for Outstanding Drama Series were Killing Eve (BBC America), Pose (FX), Ozark (Netflix), Succession (HBO), Better Call Saul (AMC), Bodyguard (Netflix) and This Is Us (NBC). With this victory, Thrones has won the category four of the last five years.

The show, based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series, also dominated the acting categories with nine nominations for performances. Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke were nominated in the Outstanding Lead Actor and Actress categories, although both lost in their categories.

Alfie Allen, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Peter Dinklage competed for the Outstanding Supporting Actor award, with Dinklage coming out on top. Gwendoline Christie, Lena Headey, Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams were all nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress, but lost to Ozark‘s Julia Garner.

Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were up for two awards Sunday night. The duo was nominated for Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Directing for the series finale, “The Iron Throne.” David Nutter was also nominated for directing “The Last of the Starks” and Miguel Sapochnik was nominated for directing “The Long Night.”

While the main Game of Thrones series is over, do not expect this to be the last time we hear about Westeros at the Emmys. HBO has big plans for the franchise moving forward, with the pilot for a show set thousands of years before the events in Game of Thrones already complete. Another prequel series is rumored to be in the works, with the second one set 300 years, telling the stories of the dragonlords.

While the prequels are in the works, there are no plans to tell the stories of the GoT characters after the events in “The Iron Throne” finale.

“Part of it is, I do want this show this Game of Thrones, Dan and David’s show to be its own thing. I don’t want to take characters from this world that they did beautifully and put them off into another world with someone else creating it. I want to let it be the artistic piece they’ve got,” HBO Programming President Casey Bloys told The Hollywood Reporter.

“That’s one of the reasons why I’m not trying to do the same show over,” Bloys continued. “George has a massive, massive world; there are so many ways in. That’s why we’re trying to do things that feel distinct — and to not try and redo the same show. That’s probably one of the reasons why, right now, a sequel or picking up any of the other characters doesn’t make sense for us.”

Photo credit: HBO