Five principal cast members were paid $1 million per episode in the final season, and that single figure captures most of what the Wikipedia: Game of Thrones article is trying to document: a production that started modest and ended up among the most expensive television ever made. The page tracks the show across its full HBO run, eight seasons and 73 episodes that aired from April 2011 to May 2019, and it does not flinch from the money. Season one carried a budget of $50 to 60 million for the whole stretch. By season eight, the article reports roughly $15 million per episode. That contrast, laid out in plain numbers, is what Wikipedia: Game of Thrones does well, and does consistently.
Creators and source novels
The lead wastes little time on the basics any reader would want first. The series was created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, adapted from George R. R. Martin's novel sequence "A Song of Ice and Fire," with the first season drawing directly on the novel "A Game of Thrones." The genre tags pile up: action, adventure, fantasy, serial drama, and tragedy, which is honest, because the show genuinely shifted register from one episode to the next. A reader who has never seen a frame of it could come away from the top of the Wikipedia: Game of Thrones page understanding what kind of production they would be sitting down to watch.
Production scale and crew
Where the Wikipedia: Game of Thrones entry gets genuinely useful is production detail. It records that the cast was described as the largest on television at the time, and it backs that scale up with crew figures: more than 300 visual effects artists and over 130 makeup professionals. Filming spread across seven countries, with the UK, Iceland, Croatia, and Spain named among them. These are the details that explain why the per-episode cost climbed the way it did, and the article connects the dots without editorializing. I find that combination of hard numbers and restraint more trustworthy than a glossy retrospective, because the page lets the figures argue the point on their own.
Emmy awards tally
Awards get heavy coverage on Wikipedia: Game of Thrones, and the counts are striking. The article credits the series with 59 Primetime Emmy Awards, the most for any drama series, alongside three Hugo Awards, a single Peabody Award, and five Golden Globe nominations. Anyone wanting to gauge how the show was received by the industry has the tally right there, broken out against the seasons it covers. The distinction between wins and nominations is kept clean, which is not always the case on pages that want to inflate a subject's standing.
Viewership growth over seasons
Viewership is handled with the same numeric discipline. Wikipedia: Game of Thrones charts audience figures from a season one average of 2.52 million viewers up to 11.99 million by season eight. That is a near-fivefold climb over the run, and seeing it broken out season by season gives a clearer sense of how the show grew into a cultural fixture than any summary sentence could. The data does the talking. A researcher tracing how a premium-cable drama builds an audience across the better part of a decade will find this stretch of the article close to a primary reference.
If there is a tension in the page, it sits in the gap between the celebratory awards count and the show's actual ending. The Wikipedia: Game of Thrones article documents 59 Emmys and a viewership peak just shy of 12 million, but the final season's critical reception was famously divisive, and a reader leaning only on the trophy tally and the audience-high number might walk away with a rosier impression than the cultural record supports. The page has the room to hold both truths. Whether the proportions feel fair will depend on which sections a given reader actually reads.
Page structure as reference hub
The coverage also reaches into history, production, cast, crew, and the show's broader cultural footprint, making the Wikipedia: Game of Thrones page function as a hub. From here a reader can branch into season pages, character pages, and episode breakdowns, the usual encyclopedia lattice. That structure is the article's quiet strength: it does not try to be the last word on the show, only the first stop, pointing outward to deeper material and not trying to contain it all.
Novels behind the show
The source material gets its due as well. The page is careful to frame the show as an adaptation, naming George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" as the wellspring and "A Game of Thrones" as the basis for the opening season specifically. That framing is the right call for a series whose later seasons outran their printed source, because the relationship between book and screen became one of the show's defining running stories, and a reader who wants to understand where the two diverged has the starting coordinates here. Wikipedia: Game of Thrones treats the books as context, not footnote.
The production geography is recorded with similar precision. Seven countries, with the UK, Iceland, Croatia, and Spain called out by name, is the sort of fact that gets thrown around loosely elsewhere but is pinned down on Wikipedia: Game of Thrones. Those locations did real work for the show's look, and tying them to the budget climb gives the page a coherence that a simple plot summary never would. The crew counts, more than 300 visual effects artists and over 130 makeup professionals, sit alongside them and reinforce the same point about scale.
Accuracy of reported figures
For day-to-day use, the Wikipedia: Game of Thrones entry behaves the way a well-tended article should. The lead summarizes, the body expands, and the production and reception sections do the heavy lifting that justifies the page's length. The numbers I spot-checked, the budget growth, the crew headcounts, the seven filming countries, the episode total of 73, all read consistently. There is no obvious padding on Wikipedia: Game of Thrones, which on a subject this size is an achievement in itself, because the temptation to let a fan-favorite article sprawl must be constant.
A reader coming for a quick fact, who created it, when it aired, how many seasons, will be in and out in under a minute. A reader settling in for the production story, the money, the visual-effects scale, the geography of the shoot, gets a much richer payoff. The Wikipedia: Game of Thrones page handles both without forcing either to wade through the other, and that balance is harder to strike than it looks.
What I keep coming back to is how much of the article's authority rests on figures that are themselves contested in the wider press. The $15 million per-episode season-eight cost, the largest-cast claim, the precise Emmy total: these are numbers that get revised as new reporting surfaces, and an encyclopedia entry is only ever as current as its last serious edit. The Wikipedia: Game of Thrones page presents them with confidence. A reader who needs the cast salaries or the viewership curve to be exactly right would still do well to chase the underlying citations, and on a subject this heavily trafficked, whether every figure still reflects the live consensus is not something the page itself can promise.
