Hacker News Reader

The article mentions many reasons, but these two stand out:

- One of the first, if not the first series where a single author wrote most episodes (and the ones JMS didn't were penned by legends such as Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman and DC Fontana).

- A five-season story arc, with episodes you should watch in order.

View on HN

The 5th season was really pretty bad though. I know they had to rush things for fear of there not being a 5th season.

Yeah, it basically was 5 seasons compressed into 3 seasons. The 5th season didn't even happen on the same network as the first few, IIRC.

Yep, the first four seasons were on a little network called PTEN that had four shows. The fifth was on TNT

It's not terribly unusual for a show to get dropped by a network and picked up by another; some other heavily serialized genre shows that have changed networks include Buffy (started on the WB and moved to UPN), Stargate (started on Showtime and moved to Sci-Fi) and The Expanse (started on Sci-Fi and moved to Prime Video)

I understand it to be that they weren't sure there was going to be a 5th so the forced two major plot lines into Season 4 which was popular enough they got Season 5 with the problem of most of the big arcs already wrapped up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com