With Game of Thrones' seventh season now officially over and the extra long night setting in until the eighth and final season begins (reports have it premiering sometime in 2019!), you're definitely going to need some shows to fill the void.
You're going to want something with top shelf drama, intrigue, mystery, and spectacle. Maybe not something with dragons specifically because the only other series with a mystical dragon right now is Iron Fist (sort of), but definitely something with scope and breadth.
Here are our humble suggestions of shows for you to absorb during the down time. It's an excellent collection of series that represent some truly tremendous TV. Most of them are newer shows, though you can also check out some of the ones we recommend last year when Thrones went on break, like BSG and Lost.
The coolest and most labyrinthine new series, and the one HBO actually eyes as Game of Thrones' successor in terms of ratings and fan engagement, is the twisting A.I. adventure Westworld, from Johnathan Nolan (The Dark Knight, Person of Interest) and Lisa Joy. Westworld - about a theme park filled with mechanized "hosts" designed to fulfill the grand wishes of guests - is filled with riddles, Easter eggs and a "call and response" type of storytelling that almost dares the viewer to crack the code before answers are revealed.
The Leftovers may not contain dragons or ice zombies, but it does contain existential crises ranging from depression and grief to longing and regret. And those are the real "monsters," right folks?
In all seriousness, The Leftovers, which started as a great show and improved each season, is one of the best TV shows in recent memory, filled with beauty, lunacy, and wonder, depicting a world gone mad in the wake of an unexplained event that caused 200 million people on Earth to vanish without a trace. Not only that, but it totally stuck its landing, concluding with a rare near-perfect finale that will satisfy anyone looking for a short-lived show with a solid ending.
Fargo is a weird and wonderful beast as its first season has hallmarks of being a quasi-reboot/reimagining of the famous Coen Brothers movie and yet - it's a separate story that we discover takes place in the same universe as the film. Subsequent seasons would go the anthology route, giving us a new story each year, but all of them still existing in the same world. It's a quirky crime series featuring a stinging blend of cruelty and comedy that stands right on the line between light and dark, even mixing in supernatural and extraterrestrial elements here and there.
For most of the summer, Game of Thrones aired on the same night as Showtime's 25-years-later Twin Peaks revival, making for an awesome double-bill. You might think that both shows are too different make a swell pairing, and to some extent they are, but on another level they both contain crazy and far-out-there supernatural elements that carry with them their own backstory, rules, and mythology. So then why not take in the damn fine coffee and delicious cherry pie that is ALL of Twin Peaks? That's the two seasons of the original ground-breaking ABC series, the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and the new show.
The fledgling series of the bunch, Bryan Fuller's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, on Starz, is trippy, imaginative, and pretty damn ghoulish. With all the talk of different Gods on Game of Thrones - be they the Seven, the One God (Death), or the Lord of Light - you might want to check out a show that has, basically, all the Gods. It's a world where anything anyone's ever believed in, throughout history, has been made manifest in some form or another, drawing power and strength from the simple act of belief. From Jesus to Odin to new-era iconography like "technology" and "media."
This show was on our post-Game of Thrones list last year and guess what? It's even better now! With its freshman year acting as a sort of prequel/setting the stage primer, Season 2 has ramped up the insanity while actually bringing in full elements from the Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon comic series. An argument can be made that this year's run should have been 10 episodes instead of 13, sure, but when this show is on fire it really cooks. Shout out to Pip Torrens too for embodying a truly delectable villain in The Grail's Herr Star.
What are you going to binge now that Game of Thrones is gone for a while? Let us know in the comments below.
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association (TCA). Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at http://ift.tt/2aJ67FB.
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