With Game of Thronesreturning for its sixth season on April 24th, HBO and its recent high-profile addition Bill Simmons have teamed up for an aftershow about the George R.R. Martin saga. Dubbed After the Thrones, the post-show series will be hosted by Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan of The Ringer, Simmons new online venture with HBO.
After the Thrones will make its Season Six debut on Monday, April 25th, one day after the season premiere. For now, the aftershow will only be available on HBO Now, HBO Go and HBO On-Demand services, but it could be added into the HBO lineup at a later date, Variety reports.
HBOs move into the world of aftershows a stalwart of cult AMC shows like Breaking Bad (Talking Bad) and The Walking Dead (Talking Dead) comes after the network revealed that they would not be sending screener copiesto TV critics and reviewers in order to avoid spoilers across time zones.
However, as George R.R. Martin has already noted,Season Six could serve as one big spoiler alert for his A Song of Ice and Fire series, as he did not complete work on The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in the saga, before his self-imposed deadline.
I never thought the series could possibly catch up with the books, but it has, Martin wrote to fans in January. The show moved faster than I anticipated and I moved more slowly. There were other factors too, but that was the main one. Given where we are, inevitably, there will be certain plot twists and reveals in season six of Game of Thrones that have not yet happened in the books. For years my readers have been ahead of the viewers. This year, for some things, the reverse will be true. How you want to handle that hey, thats up to you.