'Game of Thrones' 2019's Most-Tweeted About Show

However else it failed or triumphed this year, Game of Thrones reigned supreme on Twitter. The [...]

By Michael Hein

However else it failed or triumphed this year, Game of Thrones reigned supreme on Twitter. The show was officially revealed to be the most tweeted-about series in 2019, for better or for worse. The news comes from Twitter itself, which released its year-in-review data last week.

Twitter summed up 2019 with the most talked-about shows, movies, memes and other phenomena of the year on Monday. Few people will be surprised to hear that, in the year of its controversial final season, Game of Thrones took the top stop for TV shows.

According to Twitter's blog, the most tweeted-about show was determined not by total volume of tweets, but by the number of users tweeting about each topic. This way, a few enthusiastic users could not tip the scale towards their favorite show without anyone else watching. Game of Thrones was followed in the TV category by Stranger Things. After that came The Simpsons, La Casa De Papel and Grey's Anatomy.

The movies category was also not too surprising. The number one spot went to Avengers: Endgame, followed by Toy Story 4, The Joker, Spider-Man: Far From Home and The Lion King. This means that Disney made four out of the top five most tweeted-about movies of the year. If that were not enough, four out of the top five actors on Twitter this year were Marvel Studios stars — Tom Holland, Chris Evans, Zendaya and Robert Downey Jr.

A lot of these global sensations are predictable, although it is still neat to use these social media engagement metrics to review the year. However, Game of Thrones is a special case here, as it had such an emotionally confusing year. The show came to a close in May, wrapping up almost a decade of TV dominance with a season that most fans seemed to feel was its worst ever.

Game of Thrones Season 8 was the show's third working completely off of original material, with only a vague outline from author George R. R. Martin on where his books might end up when he got there. It was also the second season shortened in length, with just six episodes instead of the usual 10.

All of these decisions seemed to stem from showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly in April that they had chosen to cut the show down.

"HBO would have been happy for the show to keep going, to have more episodes in the final season," Benioff said. "We always believed it was about 73 hours, and it will be roughly that. As much as they wanted more, they understood that this is where the story ends."

Fans were furious at this news, especially as many speculated that the duo were just anxious to get away from Game of Thrones and on to the Star Wars trilogy they had been hired to write. Ironically, they left that job a few moths later, and many speculated that it was the intense fan outcry against them that led to that decision.

So, while Game of Thrones might have been a hot topic online this year, the conversation was complex and not always positive. Hopefully, with the next book and the spinoff series both on the way, there will be more pleasant conversations about Westeros down the line.

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