Dear Gossips,

It could be 18 months. The wait could be as much as a year and a half before we get to the final season of Game Of Thrones. This is terrifying to me. Who will I be in 18 months? Who will we be in 18 months? This is melodramatic, no doubt. After all, it’s really only a TV show, although you wouldn’t think it the way I was acting all weekend, just trying to make it to Sunday. 

Here’s how the night was supposed to go: Kill time from 8pm – 9pm ET watching the MTV VMAs, Game Of Thrones from 9pm – 1030pm. And then go back to the VMAs on recorded delay. Ended up not bothering with the rest of the VMAs. Even Taylor Swift wanted to avoid the 9 o’clock hour. I’m curious how that conversation went. You think she and her team made a point to tell the VMAs that they needed to air the video for Look What You Made Me Do before the Dragon and the Wolf? 

Ratings for the VMAs have been steadily declining over the years, which is why MTV is pivoting to using social media as a benchmark for the show’s success. Game Of Thrones ratings, however, are only increasing while the show also maintains a strong social media presence. The season premiere, Dragonstone, brought in over 16 million viewers in the US on its first play and that episode has since gone over 30 million. The numbers for last night’s season finale aren’t available yet but there’s little doubt, the figure will be big, especially when you factor in the worldwide audience. How committed are people about this show? In the UK there are a record number of viewers tuning in to watch the show at 2am every week so that they can experience it at the same time as North America. It’s been, what? Like 20 years maybe since that’s happened with a TV series? In 2016, there were 455 TV shows broadcast across a multitude of platforms. That number will probably grow to 500 this year. With so many options, it’s less and less likely for all of us to be consuming the same thing at the same time. Which is why some argue that Game Of Thrones might be the “very last piece of the TV monoculture”. Or at least, the last one in a while.

18 months though. F-ck.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey