I came to Game of Thrones late. But I loved the series once I got into it.

Don't know how many people there are like me — someone who heard of Game of Thrones when it first aired in 2011, took a quick look at it, and decided it wasn't for them.

Probably quite a few.

These are the folks I'm writing this blog post for, because earlier this year I had an urge to give Game of Thrones another chance. After watching the first few episodes of Season 1 on HBO Max,  I became so addicted to the series that was all I watched during my "me" time every day until I'd gotten through all 73 episodes over eight seasons.

(My wife and I watch TV separately early in the evening when we're eating dinner. She prefers period pieces and documentaries; I prefer intrigue and violence. Later in the evening we watch a streaming show together, as there's some overlap in our preferences.)

Game of Thrones is one of the best series I've ever seen. A big advantage of coming to it late, as I did, is that all of the seasons can be watched without interruption. Naturally the last episode of each season ends in a cliffhanger, to whet the appetite of Game of Thrones fans for the next season.

I could move directly to the next season. It must have been tough for those Game of Thrones addicts who watched it "live" and had to wait quite a few months for the next season to answer the questions that the previous season raised.

There were plenty of them. I enjoyed the large number of leading characters and plot lines. Some characters and plot lines appealed to me more than others. If I was watching a less interesting aspect of Game of Thrones, I knew that the aspect I liked more would return before too long.

I recall that when I watched the first episode of Season 1 way back when, probably 2011, I thought Game of Thrones was just about sex and violence. Which in large part it is. However, the sex and violence is in service of complicated stories of power, treachery, bravery, lies, honesty, and so much more. 

The series speaks to universal themes.

Though it has a medieval flavor (the setting is fantastical, yet rooted in human history with knights, kings, queens, jousting, swords, and such, plus fire-breathing dragons, which obviously aren't historical), the story lines are familiar to anyone who follows modern politics.

I don't want to give away any specifics about how the series ends, since I'm hoping some people will be impelled to start watching Game of Thrones. Suffice it to say that a central theme, which runs throughout the series, is whether being honest, true, and moral is a better or worse route to becoming a ruler than being dishonest, false, and treacherous. 

Like all great series, every leading character is a mixture of good and bad, strength and weakness, virtue and vice. It's just a matter of degree that distinguishes the characters I liked the most from the characters I liked the least.

This doesn't happen to me when I'm watching a television series of lesser quality, but with Game of Thrones, there were several times when I had to press "stop" on my Apple TV remote because one of my favorite characters was about to either live or die, and I didn't want them to die.

Once I walked away from the TV with an image on the screen showing a male character standing alone in a field with a mass of mounted soldiers galloping toward him, bent on killing him. I had to wait until the next day to learn what happened, I was so nervous. Another time a favorite female character riding a dragon had a much enlarged crossbow dragon killer machine pointed directly at her. I had to pause my viewing then also.

Now I'm into House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones prequel. It isn't as good as Game of Thrones, but it's better than most of the stuff being streamed, and I'm hooked on it also.