The show leaves us with the feeling that the world would have been better off if all that outrageous amount of money that was poured into making it should have been spent on feeding the poor. The entire show is made so dark, we cannot see all the amazing details we kept hearing about! If I were a set or costume designer of this show, I would probably take legal action against the showrunners for ruining my hard work by putting it all in such darkness.
Ryan Condal writes like a college student, using all the writing tools one learns about in school, making the show feel like something for his teachers to grade.
Switching actors within the same season, while making only the king grow old by makeup AND letting some actors keep their original roles and not age a day is just ridiculous. They're talking about giving Peddy C. an award for his performance, but it seems unfair to give only him this opportunity to change in front of our eyes and not the others - seems like a planned award to me, unfair to all the other actors if it happens.
GOT keeping to the books worked, because the books were written during a lifetime, and they were brilliant. HOTD keeping to the book is a stupid idea, as the book is a history book, done rather quickly to fill in some Westerosi history, mostly packed with details from other books we already know. This gave us a rushed, hard-to-understand story, for which each episode needed explanations from the showrunners for us to understand what they wanted us to understand. All that should have been done with great writing instead, and it all should have folded out in front of our eyes.
One star is given for all the hard work of all the artists in the show, who all did their best to give us their best. The other star is given for allowing the fans to see the events of the books on our screens, even if it isn't as good as we all hoped it would be. Topping, or even matching Game of Thrones, prooves to be an undoable task.