HBO game of Thrones It turned 15 last month and it’s understandable that people are feeling nostalgic, including those who worked on it.
In blue skyWriter Bryan Cogman recalled his experience writing for the show when it was in its infancy. Its first episode was the fourth of the first season.Cripples, bastards and broken things” which is now 15 as of this weekend. Thrones First filmed in 2009, he served as the in-house “expert” who created accessible documents for family trees, characters, and the like. That job led him to help showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss finish the season, and then allowed him to write assignments on that episode, which he thought at the time was just a simple training exercise.
I wasn’t going to be involved in the whole #GoT15 thing, because… well, I don’t work for HBO anymore (haha) but I owe so much to the show and its fans that I thought I’d post a little about the first episode I ever wrote – 104: ‘Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things’… which premiered 15 years ago today… (cont.)
—Bryan Cogman (@bryancogman.bsky.social) May 8, 2026 at 11:20
In the extensive thread, Cogman discusses the process of filming the episode and one of his favorite moments to view Bran Stark dreams. some may remember game of Thrones as HBO’s first foray into genre television, and as such, the team and network were nervous about tackling those fantasy elements. (He even called Thrones “quite a bit” compared to other shows airing at the time on the network like Boardwalk Empire.) Despite “a lot of pressure” to stop that, he said “Fuck it, I’ll write it anyway.” and came up with a version of the dream that “wasn’t also Fantastic, but enough to see where we were going.”
At this point in his career, Cogman had no writing experience and hoped to become a writer for the show in later seasons. But because HBO had told Benioff and Weiss to hire freelancers, they cast him from the first season staff, a team that also included George R.R. Martin and veteran Buffy writer Jane Espenson. While he was extremely grateful to Benioff and Weiss for giving him a chance, Cogman also credited the environment at HBO back then, when “the creatives and executives really felt like collaborators.” Filming the episode was also his first unofficial attempt as a set producer. It was a role Weiss and Benioff wanted for Cogman, and one he then officially graduated to while continuing to write for future seasons.
Cogman is now a consulting producer at The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, and consider Thrones his “film school (that) spoiled me for life. I learned everything I know about writing and production by being in his trenches. GoT was very close to not happening in the early days for multiple reasons. Ultimately, it was about the right people being there to do it, the network taking a chance on us and the material, and the world loving it. (…) So, happy birthday, game of Thrones! What is dead can never die.”
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