To Fix the Broken Game of Thrones Pilot, HBO Called on Its Secret Weapon

HBO has always set itself apart, whether in making real an inward-gazing drama about depressed mobsters, a boundary-pushing comedy about the sex lives of four independently minded women, or an unsparingly violent portrait of a once-great American city brought low by corruption and capitalism. HBO executives proudly took risks. But Game of Thrones was a unique beast. Series creators and showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff worked with author George R.R. Martin for years to adapt his dense, lore-filled A Song of Ice and Fire novels before GOT’s April 2011 premiere. The fantasy series would be distinctly different from HBO’s other airing dramas, including the gangster-focused Boardwalk Empire and the campy, sexy True Blood.

At least that was the goal. Then HBO executives got a look at the first version of the pilot episode, “Winter Is Coming,” which felt so off that they were forced to utter two magic words: “Call Timmy.” In this excerpt from It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO, authors Felix Gillette and John Koblin explain the unique respect director Timothy Van Patten commanded at HBO and how his work on Game of Thrones changed the fortunes of the network that recently wrapped season one of the series’s first spinoff, House of the Dragon.

EXCERPT FROM 'IT'S NOT TV: THE SPECTACULAR RISE, REVOLUTION, AND FUTURE OF HBO'

Much to the dismay of HBO executives, when the pilot for Game of Thrones came in, it was terrible — a convoluted, off-putting mess. Despite a lavish $10 million budget, the costumes looked funny. The hair and makeup looked worse. And for a grandiose epic fantasy story, the pilot felt frustratingly claustrophobic. It lacked a sense of grandeur.

Richard Plepler, the head of HBO, considered pulling the plug. The network could cut its losses. But there was also an important principle involved. The key to HBO’s fortunes, Plepler and his colleagues believed, was identifying talented, singular artists and doing everything they could to support them.

After some consideration, Plepler decided to give its creators a second chance. HBO ordered ten episodes including a reshot pilot. To get started, HBO decided to switch directors. They needed serious help. It was time to call upon the network’s prized secret weapon. It was time to call Timmy.

Tim Van Patten grew up in the suburbs of New York City, on Long Island, and started his career in TV as an actor. As a teenager in 1978, he landed his first significant role, playing a high-school basketball player in The White Shadow, a critically acclaimed CBS drama created by Bruce Paltrow. After spending much of his 20s acting, Van Patten wanted to move behind the camera. “When you’re an actor in television, the majority of your time is spent waiting for something to happen,” he says. “And for me, I wanted to be in the game. I wanted to be the catcher, not the right fielder. I wanted to see the field. I wanted to be in every play.”

In the mid-1990s, he began directing for a handful of broadcast TV dramas including Touched by an Angel, a long-running, intensely saccharine religious series that aired on CBS. The show was everything that HBO at the time was defining itself against: cheerful, uplifting, fuzzily spiritual, and predictably formulaic.

Despite the wildly different styles and target demographic, Van Patten got an interview with David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, before the suburban mob drama premiered. “David sat me down and we had a talk about everything but the show,” Van Patten says. They chatted about food, comedies, gangsters, Italy, and Van Patten’s upbringing in Massapequa, a town populated by so many Italians and Jews that it was nicknamed Matzoh-Pizza. They hit it off, and Chase welcomed him into the rotation.

In the years that followed, while still doing the occasional episodes of Touched by an Angel, Van Patten emerged as a key member of The Sopranos team. Once, before the third season, he swung by the show’s writers’ room and told everyone about a dream he had about Paulie and Christopher hunting down a Russian mobster in the snow-covered woods in rural New Jersey. Chase loved it, and the dream ended up inspiring “Pine Barrens,” one of the most famous episodes of The Sopranos.

Throughout the years, when Chase found himself too busy to direct an episode he intended to take on, he’d bark out the same instruction to his producers: “Call Timmy.” Van Patten ultimately directed more episodes of the series than anyone else, 20 in total, including some of the edgiest, most celebrated, and most violent.

Over time, word spread in the HBO universe of Van Patten’s skills, and he started directing key episodes of other HBO series including The Wire, Rome, and Deadwood. During the high-stakes final season of Sex and the City, the network asked Van Patten to come in and help, even though the show’s material felt foreign to the director with the heavy Long Island accent.

One day, while on set, Van Patten was instructed to get a wide shot. He asked why.

“We must see the shoes — we must have the Mononcoli Boncoli shoes,” Van Patten recalls being told. “Whatever they’re called — the Mongoli Bongoli shoes.” Even if he was only dimly aware of Manolo Blahniks, Van Patten was a hit among the cast and producers of Sex and the City, and he ultimately directed four episodes that season, including the series finale. The regard for Van Patten’s skills was a sentiment shared widely throughout HBO’s troupe of auteurs.

“He’s an amazing storyteller,” says Terence Winter, who worked closely with Van Patten on The Sopranos. “He’s just got a great visual style. Funny. Adored by crews and casts alike. Really easygoing. Really fun to work with.”

Now, with HBO making the biggest gamble in the network’s history, betting a vast sum on a rejiggered Game of Thrones, the network once again turned to Van Patten and asked for help.

Van Patten said no. He was burned out after doing so many seasons of The Sopranos as well as several episodes of The Pacific and an upcoming series called Boardwalk Empire. Michael Lombardo, a top programming executive at the network, insisted he read the book. Van Patten got through ten pages of it. “My head exploded,” he says. “This was way too much to digest.” Then Lombardo showed him the pilot. “This isn’t going to make it,” Van Patten thought to himself.

But Lombardo was persistent. You’re the only one who can do this, Lombardo told him. Van Patten gave it more thought. Van Patten says that unlike in movies — where the director reigns supreme and, for decades, was singularly venerated by aficionados and scholars and video-store clerks — an episodic-television director is like being “a substitute teacher” or “a traveling salesman.” Now HBO was in a serious jam, and the network had been so good to him over the years. He finally relented.

“As an itinerant director, it can be a fairly lonely life, right?” he says. “It’s a little bit of a Willy Loman situation out there. You’re just bouncing from show to show, and you have really no skin in the game. But at HBO, you felt you were part of a bigger family, not just the show you were working on. Who the hell doesn’t want to be a part of a family?”

After making several tweaks to the cast, the creators got started in the summer of 2010. Van Patten directed the newly reshot pilot as well as the second episode. While on set, to get to the essence of the rambling, complicated epic, HBO’s ace show mechanic would repeatedly ask people nearby a simple, reductive question: Is this a good guy or a bad guy? “Just boil it down,” Van Patten says.

“Shooting a pilot is really hard, and getting into a series is really hard,” says Carolyn Strauss, an executive producer of the series. “If you haven’t done it before, it can overwhelm. Timmy had so much series experience, and so much series experience at HBO, they had a lot of trust and faith in him … What I think works well in television is instinct and taste that’s formed by experience.”

The new pilot impressed everyone at HBO. Following their stay of execution, the Game of Thrones team went on to complete the first season. Plepler’s decision to trust his artists — and the network’s treasured director — would prove to be one of the best in the network’s 50-year history.

Excerpted from It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO, by Felix Gillette and John Koblin. Copyright © 2022 by Felix Gillette and John Koblin. Published by arrangement with Viking Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

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