Jeremy Egner

Into this charged territory wades “Mrs. Fletcher,” beginning Sunday on HBO. A half-hour drama with comedic undertones (or maybe vice versa), it tracks a divorced empty nester named Eve Fletcher, played by Kathryn Hahn, who stumbles into a pornography obsession after her son Brendan (Jackson White) leaves for college. At the same time, events indicate that Brendan’s lifelong easy access to smut has left him with some disgraceful notions about women and intimacy.

Making things even more charged is that this tale of a woman’s carnal awakening and collegiate sexual dynamics is being told by a 58-year-old man. Tom Perrotta, whose books “Election,” “Little Children” and “The Leftovers” have translated remarkably well to the screen, this time opted to oversee the translating himself, offering HBO the adaptation rights to “Mrs. Fletcher,” his 2017 novel, “with the stipulation that I’d be the showrunner,” he said recently.

HBO agreed, but the gig came with an extra degree of difficulty: Though presumably no one would know the ins and outs of the book as well as its author, “Mrs. Fletcher” arrives at a time when questions about sexual politics and who gets to tell what kinds of stories are more prevalent than ever.

So it was that Perrotta found himself in a “six-month argument” over his own novel about how much sympathy an entitled college bro deserves, what things Eve would or wouldn’t say and what kind of pornography a woman like her would find alluring. Significant aspects of the book, including the ending, were changed over the author’s objections.

“I was outvoted plenty of times,” Perrotta said. “But in most cases I came to see they were right.”

According to others on the show, it was that attitude that ultimately made the whole thing work.

“We had a wide swath of experience, and Tom was really open to hearing from us,” said Elle McLeland, one of the writers. “He recognized the value of that — it wasn’t just ‘Hey I asked a woman, isn’t that good enough?’ He knew the story would be better because of it.”

As ambitious TV serials have proliferated, a number of novelists have moved from solely supplying grist for shows to becoming showrunners themselves, whether for adaptations of their own books (Neil Gaiman for “Good Omens”) or of other series (Gillian Flynn for “Utopia”) or for original shows (Michael Chabon for “Star Trek: Picard”).

Perrotta, who has seen all of his novels get at least optioned for adaptation, has been moving in this direction since “Election,” in which he introduced the now-archetypal striver Tracy Flick. The author barely weighed in on Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor’s screenplay for the 1999 film adaptation. (“I didn’t know anything about scripts at the time, but I could tell that one was great,” he said.) But a few years later he wrote the script for the 2006 adaptation of his suburban infidelity tale “Little Children” with the director Todd Field, and Perrotta followed that by creating HBO’s “The Leftovers,” based on his 2011 novel of the same name, with Damon Lindelof.

The author strongly disagrees with “the notion that you have to be a certain identity to write about a certain identity, because then all we’d have is autofiction.” But he and the producers knew a roomful of dudes wasn’t going to cut it for “Mrs. Fletcher.” The writers’ room had more women than men and all of the directors were women, including Nicole Holofcener, who shot the pilot, Carrie Brownstein and Gillian Robespierre.

“When you have such a strong actress as the lead of it, having a female voice as director is really important,” said Helen Estabrook, an executive producer.

With its screen-addled suburbanites negotiating sex, shifting mores, loneliness and identity, “Mrs. Fletcher” — both the book and series — is vintage Perrotta, the latest of his tales to mine au courant anxieties for drama and dark comedy. As Eve pursues ever bolder adventures alone and with others, secondary characters — an aimless, sexually fluid co-worker, a trans professor romancing one of her students — are given space to sort through their own issues.

“For so long trans people on television have been the butt of jokes or murder victims,” McLeland, who is transgender, said of Margo, the professor played by Jen Richards. “She’s treated like a human who gets to do human things — I hate that it’s such a novelty.”

As with the novel, the series’ narrative is split between Eve’s and Brendan’s experiences, a structure designed, Perrotta said, to reflect that “the sexual culture in America has changed so much in my lifetime, it’s really difficult for one generation to talk to the generation below it.”

That dynamic played out in the writers’ room. Particularly heated fault lines broke along how sympathetically the show should treat the occasionally despicable Brendan — younger writers pressed for more explicit “moral judgment,” Perrotta said — and how male gaze-y the pornography seen in “Mrs. Fletcher” should be.

“Some people wanted more feminist porn, but my point was that Eve wasn’t an expert consumer, so she’d be using whatever was most prevalent,” Perrotta said. (Complicating this was the challenge of getting permission to use the clips from the producers and performers. “I didn’t want someone’s grandma to turn on HBO and accidentally see them,” Perrotta said.)

For Hahn, the “Pandora’s box of porn” is really just a vehicle for exploring a woman who was breaking out of her prescribed cultural boxes: mother, caretaker, fading divorcée. “It’s almost like she’s having an affair with herself,” she said.

While Hahn sympathized with the “very vulnerable position” of a novelist offering up his work for dissection and revision by committee, the role of Eve required her to be plenty vulnerable, too. Being Eve involved emotional and physical nakedness, as well as intimate scenes that could occasionally veer into the ridiculous — one montage finds her clumsily experimenting with S&amp;M; by spanking herself. (Closed sets, female directors and an intimacy coordinator made things as comfortable as possible.)

“The material and what I had to do” left Hahn more protective than usual of the character, she said, and with strong opinions about what Eve would say and do that didn’t always jibe with what was in the script. “We would get into it and Tom would hear me, and we would futz with it and figure it out,” she said.

What that looked like in practice, Perrotta said, was rewrite after rewrite. Sometimes early in the process — after a table read, say — sometimes on the fly on set. “I can see them in the show now, these lines that were written in a panic while she was getting her hair done,” he said.

But in the end, all the angst, argument and often intense negotiation felt like proof that the whole thing was worth doing.

“Even when it felt like we’d just wasted a day going down a rabbit hole that we shouldn’t have gone down, it also created this ongoing feeling of, like, this material is radioactive,” he said. “That we’re getting close to the hot center of something that’s really important to the culture right now.”

This article originally appeared in

Making 'Mrs. Fletcher': Arguing. Futzing. Spanking. Agreeing.

Porn is a complex cultural force, a tool of exploitation, degradation and perhaps self-discovery that, in our age of constant connectivity, is rarely more than a few clicks away.

“Five hours from now, 2,000 people will have seen the ‘Watchmen’ pilot,” he said, looking ahead to the show’s debut at New York Comic Con that afternoon. “Conservatively speaking, 1,000 of them are going to hate it.”

The reception ultimately was much warmer than that. But Lindelof’s apprehension was understandable given both his past adventures in fan rage as a creator of “Lost” and the audacity of his “Watchmen,” debuting Sunday on HBO.

The ambitious comic series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, which first appeared in 1986, imagined a realistic group of “costumed vigilantes” enmeshed in the nuclear arms race and Vietnam War, among other geopolitical conflicts. Set in 1985 at what seems like the brink of World War III, “Watchmen” replaced the usual pieties and gamma rays of the superhero genre with existential musings on time and trauma, history and hero complexes, and remains hallowed by fans like Lindelof, who called it “a masterpiece.”

A 2009 film version was faithful to the source material, arguably to a fault. But HBO’s version is a daring departure, replacing the original’s Cold War themes with a new story based in America’s legacy of white supremacy, beginning with a depiction of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 before moving to an alternate version of the present day. Now masks are even more abundant, worn by both the police and the white nationalist terrorist cell they’re battling. Known as the Seventh Kalvary, the group has taken as its uniform the black-and-white-splotched face mask of Rorschach, probably the best known of the original “Watchmen” characters.

“That connects with what I think is the central core of all ‘Watchmen’ ideology,” Lindelof said. “Which is when you put a mask on, it brings out this part of you that is basically like, ‘[expletive] all y’all. I’m going to do what I’m going to do.’ ”

Regina King stars as Angela Abar, a purportedly former cop who actually still works with police as her masked alter ego, Sister Night. The role appealed to an actor who has “wanted to be a hero for as long as I can remember,” she said, but one more in line with the kind of vulnerable, complicated characters King has played in films and series like “If Beale Street Could Talk,” “American Crime” and “The Leftovers,” her previous collaboration with Lindelof.

“This woman is complex; she’s flawed,” King said of Angela. “Heroes struggle, too.”

Other stars include Jeremy Irons and Jean Smart playing older versions of the “Watchmen” characters Adrian Veidt and Laurie Juspeczyk, and Tim Blake Nelson and Don Johnson in original roles. The show received a blessing from Gibbons, but the famously irascible Moore, who is even more famously contemptuous of screen adaptations of his work, insisted that his name be left off the series entirely. (The credits read, “Based on characters cocreated for DC by Dave Gibbons.”) Regardless, “if this becomes a gateway drug to go and read those 12 issues or that graphic novel, I’m like, mission accomplished,” Lindelof said.

In a hotel in New York City, King and Lindelof discussed how “Watchmen” channels the comic and how it doesn’t, and why the series will be a Rorschach test for viewers. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: The first couple episodes are disorienting, even if you know the “Watchmen” story. Was that intentional?

DAMON LINDELOF: Yes, definitely. First off, that’s the kind of storytelling that I’ve always gravitated to, what I call the “Thursday crossword puzzle.” It’s manageable but difficult, and it’s going to take some time. More important, I was trying to replicate the feeling that I had when I read the original “Watchmen” when I was 13, which was not dissimilar from being dropped on my head. I didn’t know what I was supposed to know versus what I wasn’t supposed to know.

REGINA KING: In interviews I’ve had only one person who, bless his heart, just could not put things together. Like, things that were actually spelled out, he still couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

LINDELOF: They’re spelled out like a “Wheel of Fortune” puzzle, though. That’s our version of spelling things out.

Q: You get the R, the S, the T, the L —

KING: The N and the E.

LINDELOF: We all know; we all play the “Wheel.” The good news is there is a tool for the audience, and that tool is called the internet. If there is any confusion, all they have to do is go on Twitter and say, “Am I supposed to know what that joke means?” And there will be 100 people there to explain it.

KING: And 50 of the explanations will be all different. I was not familiar with the comic book, and I was able to follow, which is important because I do represent a huge part of the audience.

Q: There are many Easter eggs, but the most prominent echoes are structural. How did you approach adapting it?

LINDELOF: It started with a very specific plan: There’s a murder in the first episode, and by the ninth episode, we’re going to know who did it and why, just like in the original “Watchmen.” There are going to be other mysteries, and those mysteries are going to be resolved by the end, too. Why are these people behaving in this way? Why does Angela call herself Sister Night?

But then there’s the other thing: What’s our relationship with the original? When the New Testament came along, it didn’t erase the Old Testament; it just said, “We’re going to focus more on Jesus Christ here. Adam and Eve still happened.” That was sort of our approach. We needed to be in a conversation with it, but I also didn’t want the audience who hadn’t read it to feel like all the cool kids were whispering about an inside joke that they didn’t get.

As a fan of “Watchmen,” I was like, OK, Adrian Veidt has to be in the show. I want to see what that guy looks like 30 years later. And Laurie Juspeczyk was the other character I was really interested in. But I want people to embed with this new story, which was why we set it in Tulsa and not in New York. Those characters are going to be supporting characters in new characters’ journeys, versus the other way around.

Q: Race is at the center of the story. Nuclear holocaust was the big existential threat in the comic, but here it’s white supremacy. Why did you make that choice?

LINDELOF: What’s the equivalent now of impending nuclear war? What’s creating the big cultural anxiety? For me, it’s the anxiety of a reckoning. Not because there are white supremacists, but because I am complicit in white supremacy. Because I’m a white man, I’ve gotten to take this entirely different path through life.

So that reckoning, that process, the identification of white supremacy as a bad guy in a superhero comic book that could not be defeated — the Klan wears masks, but why are they never the villains in a superhero story? Those ideas felt like natural fits for “Watchmen.” The original is provocative; it’s dangerous; it’s groundbreaking; it’s political; it’s unsafe. The idea for the show had to check all those boxes.

Q: How did you arrive at that idea?

LINDELOF: I had read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations,” and it totally shifted my perception of United States history. He mentioned Tulsa, the massacre of Black Wall Street, which I had never heard of. Tulsa just felt like Krypton to me. It felt like the destruction of a world. It felt like this peaceful utopia with all these intelligent people who had built this safe haven, and it was just destroyed overnight. I was like, “That’s the idea.”

I was really nervous about it. I didn’t know if it was a story that I necessarily should be telling. I went into HBO and I said to them, “This is kind of what I’m thinking,” and they really gelled to the idea.

Q: Is it a story you should be telling?

LINDELOF: That’s not a question I’m qualified to answer. But I will say I’ve spent a lot of time driving around looking at billboards and going, like, “Oh, there’s only white people on these billboards.” And then I’m like, “Oh, I’ve made a career of basically putting white people on billboards, and I keep making television shows about really attractive men in their mid-40s who are having existential and spiritual crises.” I’m in a position to do something different, and this is something that I care about, too.

I’m not deflecting responsibility, but there were 12 people in the writers’ room, and only four of them, at any one time, were white men. So this question that you asked was vigorously debated over and over again. But if the criticism is “this wasn’t your story to tell,” but a lot of people learn what happened in Tulsa almost 100 years ago as a result, I’m willing to take that hit. Not because I’m a white savior, but because I think this is a compelling story worth telling.

KING: Is it OK for him to be telling that story? Well, Damon is American. This story is American history. Has there been revisionist history? Absolutely. That’s the reason we have so many things stuffed away and so much pain and fear that hasn’t been addressed. I feel lucky to be a part of pushing people to look at it, and I am happy that Damon has created the opportunity for us to do this.

Q: Were there ever actual events that bled into the show, or vice versa?

LINDELOF: Episode 6 had been shot when … I’ll just say that it had some very uncanny similarities to the Jussie Smollett case, except it actually happens. As soon as that story broke, in its initial incarnation — it certainly didn’t occur to me that it might not have actually happened — I was like, “Oh my God, people are going to think we are ripping this from the headlines.” And then, of course, that story took a lot of twists and turns.

Q: The original was pretty male-heavy — it was called “Watchmen,” after all — but the show is driven largely by women, starting with Angela. Was that a conscious subversion of the source material?

LINDELOF: It wasn’t like we sat down and said, “Let’s pass the Bechdel test.” But in that room of 12 writers, seven of them were women. So they were like, “We want to tell these stories,” and I was like, “That feels like a story I haven’t heard before.”

KING: This woman was someone I had never seen before. Obviously, because she’s black, that has a lot to do with that. But even more than that, just being the lead and being so strong, but so vulnerable. We see that inner turmoil. Even when you’re waiting for her to become unhinged, you don’t know exactly what “unhinged” is for her.

Q: The original was a subversive take on superheroes at a time when they were mostly limited to comic books and cartoons. Now that they dominate pop culture, how does that change the context of your show?

LINDELOF: There have been superhero movies like “Deadpool” or “Logan” that are incredibly irreverent. You have to drown out all that noise and say, “Is there a way for us to do something different in this space?” We should be able to do stuff in “Watchmen” that they can’t do in the “Avengers” movies. And I love those movies, by the way.

KING: We still have nods to those films and stories. Sister Night doesn’t have a cape, but her skirt is like a cape, and it flows like a cape when she moves.

LINDELOF: And she has a hood, which is totally charged as a costume, especially for a woman of color.

Q: “Watchmen” echoes some of America’s societal ills, and things like “Joker” have been condemned recently for doing so irresponsibly, according to its critics. Does that concern you regarding how people will receive your show?

LINDELOF: Are we trying to be topical just for the sake of being topical? No. But we did want to tap into what was happening around us and tell a story that was reflective of the times we’re in. That’s what the original “Watchmen” did, and that’s what we wanted to do.

At the same time, it’s a TV show, and it’s a parable. So you will see people in Klan robes, which is a real thing, and then squids will fall from the sky, which is not. We know we’re playing with fire, and we know that the audience is increasingly having a difficult time telling fact from fiction, when fact feels so absurd and fiction feels so real. I also think that there’s a clickbait-y culture right now that is saying “Joker” is a dangerous movie before anyone has even seen it, just because it feels dangerous. So if the filmmakers of “Joker” come out and say, “We had no idea we were making a dangerous movie; we’re incredulous about it” — how could that be?

We know that we made something that’s potentially dangerous and upsetting. We know that we appropriated a beloved graphic novel, and we know that white supremacists appropriating the mask of someone who was construed as a hero in that graphic novel is not going to be loved by everyone. But we still feel like it’s interesting. The show in and of itself is a Rorschach test — everybody’s going to see something a bit different, based on who they are and what their relationship with “Watchmen” is.

KING: I would hate for people to walk away and just say that they didn’t feel anything. We didn’t do our jobs if we didn’t make people feel something. My hope is that people are honest about what they feel.

LINDELOF: I mean, I’ve done a lot of therapy to get to the place where I can say, “I want to generate strong feelings, and I may not have control over what those strong feelings are.” But it beats the hell out of apathy.

The chapters of “Watchmen” are marked by illustrations of a clock ticking toward an apocalypse. But on a recent morning, Damon Lindelof, who just adapted the influential comic for HBO, was focused on a different countdown.

The Story's Heart? Race and Masks

Would we finally, in the grandest episode the show has ever attempted, get a fight that was just too large to render in a way that would both do justice to the conflict and also land with sufficient emotional impact?

Sunday’s final clash was a masterpiece of tension and release, goose bumps and heartbreak, grandiosity and intimacy. It deftly mixed genres (horror, action, melodrama), shots and planes of action as it shifted from the chaos of the fighting in and around Winterfell, to the claustrophobic terror of the crypts, to the dragon dogfighting in the winter sky.

Since computer-generated imagery became Hollywood’s default mode for depicting combat, on-screen battles have become progressively bigger, longer, more elaborate and, consequently, ever more fatiguing. Think of the hectic, numbing, city-destroying sequences that end every superhero movie. (I haven’t seen the new “Avengers,” so apologies to the Russo brothers if it managed to eschew that particular cliché.)

“Game of Thrones” has mostly avoided this convention by making its battles collections of memorable, revealing moments rather than epic clashes that overwhelm with chaotic slashing, crashing and spurting. There is plenty of that, of course, but what you remember is Ygritte dying in Jon’s arms in the Battle of Castle Black, the Night King raising the dead at Hardhome, Bronn’s incredible sprint for the Scorpion during the Loot Train Attack (still a super dumb name).

Similarly, when I look back on the Battle of Winterfell, I’ll think of the stirring scene when the Dothraki swords ignited in a wave of fire, only to extinguish one by one in the distance. I’ll remember Theon getting absolution and Lyanna sacrificing herself to kill a zombie giant in a deeply symbolic if very sad moment, the smallest warrior felling the largest foe. (Wun-Wun, is that you?) Arya’s climactic dispatching of the Night King — saving Bran with the same dagger once intended to kill him — was genuinely surprising and thrillingly rendered.

The death toll included demises predictable (Theon, Jorah) and less so (Melisandre!), but each was deeply felt and in service of individual purposes, one of the episode’s big themes. Jorah died the way he would have wanted, protecting his beloved Khaleesi. Beric saved Arya so she could save everyone else. And Edd bought it by becoming the first of several people to rescue Sam, who spent most of the episode on his back, screaming.

It wasn’t flawless. I thought Rhaegal might have died, too, until he showed up in the trailer for next week’s episode. Overall, the dragon scenes were pretty hard to track, especially the air war. Thanks to the fact that the action was very dark, per usual, and the dragons hard to tell apart — some contrasting saddles would have been nice — I frequently couldn’t tell who was who and what exactly was going on.

There was also a surprising abundance of heroes still standing at the end. I figured folks like Brienne, Podrick, Grey Worm, Tormund and maybe even Gilly, or some other notable person in the crypt, would have gone down this week. Considering the scale and relentlessness of the swarm — especially after the Night King did his signature reanimation move — they probably should have.

(A certain amount of suspended disbelief is called for in epic battle scenes, but is the show just saving them for the next war? Or is its “no one is safe” edge truly gone for good?)

But overall, despite the scale of the clash and the endless hype we’ve been hearing about the 55 nights of shoots that went into filming it, et cetera, the Battle of Winterfell actually exceeded expectations.

It began with a lengthy tracking shot through the castle’s courtyard, following Sam and then Lyanna and finally Tyrion as people like Bran and Theon passed through, reinforcing the human connections before it all went off. It was a sign that the episode was going to 1.) embrace creative shot-making, and 2.) be about people, not opposing sides.

Throughout, Sapochnik and the show’s creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who wrote the episode, skipped from character to character to shrink the churning battle down to human scale. The chaotic fog of war was well represented but so was fear and desperation — the Hound’s terror, Grey Worm’s heavy breathing — as the dead poured through and over every obstacle.

Sapochnik reportedly watched “Lord of the Rings” war scenes to gauge when battle fatigue kicks in and looked for opportunities to pare away action so that the moments of violence and loss would feel more meaningful.

That was evident in the episode’s pacing, which followed intense fighting sequences with quieter moments and clever transitions that illustrated the scope of the battle, as when the view shot upward after Lyanna’s death to join a dragon clash.

Once the action moved inside, the episode turned into a horror movie, with Arya dodging the more bookish wights in the library before joining Beric and the Hound in the zombie-plagued hallways of Winterfell. The mechanics of horror and suspense picked up where the implacable battlefield onslaught left off, a sort of second-stage narrative rocket infusing the survival story with a new visceral kick.

As for how Arya made it through said zombie-plagued hallways in order to save the day, er, night, your guess is as good as mine. I’ll also leave it to others to theorize about what the Night King’s flame retardancy might suggest about his lineage and whatnot, though I guess it doesn’t matter anymore anyway.

But I’ll take the occasional loose end in exchange for a big, audacious episode that sticks the landing. From the beginning, “Game of Thrones” has promised a clash of ice and fire, and on Sunday that’s what we got — a story of life overcoming the forces of annihilation told at a scale and level of execution rarely seen on television or anywhere else.

There have been plenty of times over the years that the show has left me cold. But not today.

A Few Thoughts While We Withhold Our Vote

— Daenerys and Jon continue to suggest that neither is ready to rule anything, from a brainpower standpoint. She just sat there on a grounded Drogon until the wights swarmed him like undead fleas. Later Jon stood up and squared off against an actual zombie dragon, only to be saved by Arya. Nice job, Targaryens.

— “Maybe we should have stayed married,” Tyrion told Sansa. “You were the best of them,” she said. Their reunion has been one of my favorite things about this season.

— I know Sansa has been jerked around by plenty of royals in her day, but it seems petty when she can’t resist a Dragon Queen dig even in the bunker of death. She would have split up our marriage anyway, she quipped. Without the Dragon Queen we’d all be dead, Missandei clapped back.

— Melisandre’s like a Zippo with a balky flint, but eventually she does the job.

— R.I.P. Viserion, for real this time.

— What happened to Ghost? He also shows up in next week’s trailer but where did he go Sunday?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/28/arts/television/game-of-thrones-battle-of-winterfell-review.html" id="29a9046d-15bd-339a-af75-8d848558672f">The New York Times</a>.

“Game of Thrones” has several outstanding battles under its belt and director Miguel Sapochnik delivered some of the best, with “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards.” But even with that impressive track record, I was a little afraid that Sunday night’s enormous (and enormously hyped) Battle of Winterfell might finally be the clash that was too epic for its own good, in terms of stakes (life vs. death), personnel (everyone we like) and length (the episode clocked in at 1:22).

'Game of Thrones' Season 8, Episode 3 Recap: Battle of Winterfell Exceeded Expectations

“We only made it this far because of Bernadette Caulfield, the greatest producer alive,” Benioff said.

Caulfield, an executive producer for the show, isn’t as familiar to fans as Benioff or Weiss or actors like Emilia Clarke (who plays the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen), Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) and Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister). But for those people, she is the real star of “Game of Thrones.”

“She’s the beating heart of our show,” Clarke said.

“The woman that I want to grow up to be like,” Turner said.

“The true Mother of Dragons,” Headey said.

“The single best thing that ever happened to the show,” Benioff and Weiss wrote in a joint email.

Even as writers and showrunners have become celebrated in this age of intensely dissected series, television is still made mostly by the unsung — all those names in the credits that turn the scripts into actual television.

This is especially true for “Game of Thrones.” With its sprawling tale unfolding in a wide variety of environments, it was almost certainly the most technically complicated series ever made, at times running five units (film crews) simultaneously, on multiple continents, to complete a given season on time.

And they rarely shot simple scenes: “Game of Thrones” became a sensation partly through gob-smacking sequences involving elaborate battles, people on fire and the occasional bear. It inhabited cliffs, crypts and caves in Northern Ireland. It closed city streets in Spain and Croatia to film riots, insurgencies and a nude walk of shame. It took a crew into an Icelandic blizzard to capture the world beyond the Wall.

Whatever your feelings about the show itself, it is inarguably a marvel of scale and execution. (Over eight seasons, it used nearly 13,000 extras in Northern Ireland alone.) And if you ask nearly anyone associated with it who the linchpin holding the entire thing together was, the answer is “Bernie.”

“Without her, the whole thing would have collapsed under its own weight long ago,” Benioff and Weiss said.

“Well, I wish I was that important,” Caulfield said when reached in England, where she’s working on Joss Whedon’s new series, “The Nevers,” for HBO. “But obviously it takes a major team to put it together.”

That team included her “wingman,” producer Chris Newman, and the show’s production designer, Deborah Riley, among many, many others. But Caulfield was the person in charge of everything, the creators said, overseeing all aspects of the production, from the enormously complex logistical planning to the budget and production schedule to the “health and happiness of the crew.”

For Caulfield, however, the task was relatively straightforward. “My job is to make whatever they write on the page come to the screen,” she said.

Caulfield grew up in upstate New York and went to high school in Rochester, where she also worked in local theater. When a movie filmed in the area in 1981, she signed on as a production assistant and was bitten by the show-business bug — she moved to Los Angeles within a year. As she rose through the industry ranks, she worked with some of the most esteemed producers in Hollywood, including Steven Bochco (on “Brooklyn South” and “Philly”), Michael Mann (“Robbery Homicide Division”) and Ridley and Tony Scott (“The Good Wife”).

She honed her multiple-unit chops as a producer on “The X-Files” and then later on the HBO polygamy drama “Big Love.” As that show was wrapping up in 2011, she heard about “sort of a fantasy, medieval piece” the network was shooting in Britain. She joined “Game of Thrones” for its second season, replacing outgoing producer Mark Huffam.

It’s easy to forget now, given the cavalcade of spectacle “Game of Thrones” has become, that it was a much quieter show in the early days. The dragons were glorified lizards and the first big combat sequence, the Battle of the Blackwater, didn’t happen until the end of Season 2.

Season 3 brought signs of the expansion to come, with new worlds and more extreme elements, like the bear that Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) squared off with in one gonzo sequence.

“Gwendoline said, ‘I can’t believe I’m working with a live bear here!’ and David said, ‘I know, I didn’t believe that Bernie would actually do this,’” Caulfield recalled, laughing. “I didn’t think I had any option but to do it.”

As the story and budgets grew, from $5 million an episode in the early days to as much as $15 million in Season 8, so did the production. If it wasn’t explicitly a goal for the show to top itself each season, that was the practical result of a story that grew from a clash of clans to a transcontinental war to — this season — a battle against an undead army for the survival of humankind.

“She created a production that could effectively scale up from season to season without losing either its efficiency or its heart,” Benioff and Weiss said. “There are so many versions of ‘Game of Thrones’ that would have fallen apart under the strain of producing 10 increasingly big hours of television on a 12-month schedule. Pretty much every version except the Bernie version.”

When Caulfield wasn’t on some far-flung set or checking out the action on any of the six stages at the show’s Belfast studio, she was in the production office planning — prepping new directors, new shoots, new countries. “It really was the Game of Meetings,” she said.

But it was her “gruff love of every damn person on the show,” Benioff and Weiss said, that made her beloved by the people she was ordering around in often extreme conditions.

“I know how heavy cable is, I know what the crew has to go through — I’m actually married to a dolly grip,” she said. “Sometimes he’d say, ‘You love your crew more than me.’ Probably at that moment I do, because I have to.”

The most emotionally taxing days were the ones that involved lighting people on fire. Stunt coordinators will generally say falls are the most dangerous, but the shoot that sticks in Caulfield’s memory is the scene in the fighting pits of Meereen in Season 6, when the big dragon Drogon — on set represented by a long pole with a ball on the end — torched multiple victims. The execution of the scene involved a flamethrower on a dolly rolling past, igniting multiple stunt performers.

“They say they don’t worry and they love doing it, but I think they’re all crazy,” she said.

The maternal dynamic extended to the actors, whose growing fame led to ever more demanding schedules to juggle as the show itself became more physically strenuous. “She literally was the mum of the whole thing,” Clarke said.

“It was like, ‘Listen, I know we’re in the middle of a field and it’s 3 a.m. and it’s the second month of night shoots and everyone’s exhausted and everyone’s screaming at you because you are the person that everyone comes to for everything, but can I just talk to you about this Dothraki line I’ve got next week?’” she added. “And she will.”

Caulfield’s angst antenna bordered on the uncanny, they say. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays the redeemed rogue Jaime Lannister, recalled a time when a stressful personal situation had him on the brink of an on-set tantrum.

“Suddenly she was next to me very gently saying, ‘Hey, are you OK?’” he said. “And just the way she said that made me look at myself from the outside and see that I was about to turn into one of those horrible actors.” He continued, “So I am really grateful that she stopped me from becoming a complete fool.”

Caulfield acknowledged that whatever considerable scheduling, weather and budgeting obstacles she overcame on “Game of Thrones,” her most important attribute on a production full of ice and fire and many flavors of human toil was her emotional intelligence. “I do feel like I’m sensitive to seeing somebody who’s not smiling as much,” she said.

“I still run into a lot of different crew, and you know, you hug them like you don’t want to let go,” she said. “A lot of people felt like it was time to move on, but I also think if it went on another five years, everybody would have hung in there for five years. Because it meant that much to all of us.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/arts/television/game-of-thrones-hbo-producer.html" id="1e5d2724-19d0-33d4-a770-03fff63fd368">The New York Times</a>.

“Game of Thrones” stars past and present filled Radio City Music Hall this month for the world premiere of the first episode of that fantasy saga’s eighth and final season, which debuts Sunday on HBO. But in their speech before the screening, creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss gave some of their deepest thanks to someone who wasn’t there and who most of the crowd probably wouldn’t recognize.

'Game of Thrones': Meet the Woman Who Is the 'Best Thing That Ever Happened to the Show'

A voice whispered into my ear: “That’s where Melisandre gave birth to the shadow monster.”

So it was — I knew it was around there somewhere, as did the dozens of “Game of Thrones” fans surrounding me, feverishly snapping selfies before returning to their tour bus in a nearby parking lot.

The voice belonged to my own guide, Flip Robinson, a 6-foot-8, magnificently bearded man who previously parlayed his stature into a gig as a stand-in for behemoth characters like Hodor and the Mountain. He waved to a colleague as she led her group away as suddenly as it had arrived, and off toward Braavos or the Iron Islands or some other “Thrones” location down the road.

Since debuting as an expensive curiosity in 2011, “Game of Thrones” has gone on to become one of the world’s most influential pop culture franchises, leaving a dragon-size footprint on everything it touches.

Nowhere is that dynamic more visible and tangible than the production’s former home, which, as the series kicks off its final season on HBO on April 14, is poised to serve as the keeper of the “Thrones” flame.

“Game of Thrones” has filmed all over the globe, including in Croatia, Spain, Morocco, Iceland and Malta, and other locations have become synonymous with the show, for better and worse. But as the home of not only the production, in Belfast’s Titanic Studios, but also Westeros itself, Northern Ireland has been transformed in fact and figment. As the series altered the TV landscape, it also altered actual landscapes: For millions of viewers all over the world, this country has been redefined and remade in the show’s image.

In the process, Belfast’s filmmaking industry has gone from a sleepy endeavor to a powerhouse. “‘Game of Thrones’ changed everything,” said Richard Williams, chief executive of Northern Ireland Screen, which promotes film and television production in the country. “We are relevant — it is basically night and day.”

The region has also built a tourism economy on the back of the show, especially on the coast, which provided much of the outdoor scenery. This majestic stretch of landscape and its famously scenic Causeway Coastal Route is now crisscrossed with motor coaches bearing “Thrones” pilgrims. Elsewhere, spots like the Castle Ward estate, near Strangford, site of the original Winterfell, have seen crowds swell with thousands of fans each year.

All told, “Thrones” has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the region. But the financial benefit might actually pale compared with a more existential one in a place that for decades was known internationally mostly for sectarian violence.

“Twenty years ago, you would have been here writing about the Troubles, not a TV show,” Gary Hawthorne, one of my drivers, told me during my visit.

Robinson said, “Fake violence has helped bring us back from the real violence.”

Part of the outsize impact “Thrones” has had on Northern Ireland comes from the size of the production relative to the size of the place, which was a main reason it was such an ideal home base. At 5,460 square miles, the country is a bit larger than Connecticut (with just over half as many residents, at around 1.9 million). But within that area is an astounding array of scenery that is particularly suited to a medieval fantasy saga.

“We had 63 locations in 10 years, every single one of them within and hour and a half of Belfast,” said Robert Boake, the supervising location manager in Northern Ireland.

This became apparent on the afternoon I spent driving with Robinson along the causeway, a twisting roadway that hugs the U-shaped glens of the coast, the Irish Sea on one side and villages and vertiginous green hillsides, strewn with sheep, on the other.

In mere hours, we spanned Westeros and beyond, moving from the Wall and Castle Black (Magheramorne quarry), to the stairs where Arya crawled out of the Braavos canal (Carnlough Harbor) to the rocky shoreline in Pyke (Ballintoy) where the Greyjoys did nutty Greyjoy stuff. We also closed the shadow-baby loop, strolling around the Stormlands meadow (near Murlough Bay) where Renly made camp until Melisandre’s monster got ahold of him. Occasionally we stopped to walk around and by turns get lashed with rain, pummeled by wind and caressed by crystalline sunshine. (“In Northern Ireland, you get four seasons in one day,” Robinson told me, which I eventually came to realize is a national slogan.)

At Fair Head outside Ballycastle, we parked in a muddy lot, dropped a few pounds in the honor box and walked uphill through a horizontal downpour. About 20 minutes later, the rain was gone and the sun dried our faces as gale-force gusts threatened to blow us over the edge of a sheer cliff dropping hundreds of feet to the rocky coast.

We’d arrived at Dragonstone, or the dazzling headland the Targaryen family stronghold was CGI’d upon, anyway. To stand where the impossibly green meadow gives way to gray granite cliffs plummeting toward the sea, as you note the spot where Tyrion and Daenerys argued over strategy, where Jon Snow met Drogon, is to feel the frisson of an epic story meeting an epic landscape.

This reciprocity between project and place extends beyond the countryside. Another reason the marriage between “Thrones” and the region has been happier than any on the show is that the production’s material needs — armor, medieval weapons, elaborate costumes and jewelry — meshed well with the area’s long-standing artisanal traditions. “We’re good at that stuff,” Williams said.

Even when a fight was filmed in a place like Morocco, the spears were almost always built in Belfast. Fans who would like to try on a replica of Cersei’s crown can often do so at Steensons jewelers in Ballymena, because that’s where the original and other Westerosi finery were designed and made. (Though when I stopped in, I was told that the show had commandeered it for Season 8 — spoiler alert, I guess?)

This may be one explanation for the general lack of resentment evident in other locations besieged by “Thrones” tourists, like Dubrovnik, the exterior home of King’s Landing, which has been almost totally overrun.

“There are not many people in this country who haven’t been involved in some direct capacity,” Boake said. “Their brother made something for the show, or their sister was an extra, or their cousin worked on an episode.”

As we drove along the coast, Robinson reminisced about his time as Hodor’s double, dodging White Walker stuntmen in the Three-Eyed Raven’s cave as he dragged Bran’s double toward a green screen, in one of the show’s most famous scenes. “Then Kristian Nairn held the door,” he said. “He did the easy bit.”

Robinson, 52, was a former carpenter laid low by the global financial crisis, working as a tour guide when he applied to be a “Thrones” extra. Soon he was facing off with the likes of Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as a stand-in for the undead Mountain, a stint that became the hook for his Giant Tours, which takes small groups of “Thrones” fans up and down the coast.

“It changed my life around,” he said.

The show has done the same for the region’s movie industry. A few films had been shot in Belfast’s cavernous old ship painting hall, now part of Titanic Studios (so named because it’s near where the doomed ocean liner, the city’s other most famous export, was built). But since “Thrones” took up residence there, it has turbocharged the business, conferring the credibility that comes from hosting the most elaborate TV series in history and training a generation of crew and craftspeople.

Belfast has since added another enormous studio complex, Belfast Harbour Studios, the current home of Syfy’s Superman prequel series “Krypton,” and postproduction houses like Yellowmoon, which worked on “Thrones,” have significantly expanded.

Then there’s the measurable financial impact: Over eight seasons, “Game of Thrones” has spent more than $275 million in the region, according to Northern Ireland Screen.

Of course, two big questions hang over all the success. One involves how Brexit might affect the industry, though Williams notes that for the large-scale productions that are Belfast’s bread and butter, significantly more production spending comes from the United States than the European Union.The other: What happens now that “Thrones” is over? While everyone is cautiously optimistic that the planned “Thrones” prequel will go forward as a series, especially given the interest HBO’s new owner, AT&amp;T;, will have in extending such a lucrative franchise, they aren’t reliant upon it. “We’re getting calls every week,” Williams said.

“I’m not in the slightest gloomy about our potential after ‘Game of Thrones,’” he added. “But at the same time, I would never want to diminish how unique a thing ‘Game of Thrones’ is.”

The most common analogy holds that “Thrones” is to Northern Ireland what the “Lord of the Rings” movies were to New Zealand — a pop culture phenomenon that showcased a wondrous land for a global audience. But one difference is that “Thrones” has helped to redefine a city once known as one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, the Troubles, which pit Protestant paramilitary groups loyal to the Crown against Catholic ones in favor of a unified, independent Ireland, claimed some 3,600 lives in bombings, sniper attacks and bloody street battles that ripped Belfast apart.

Old divisions remain and have been infused with new anxiety by Brexit, because its unclear how it will affect the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. But the show has helped “continue our peace process,” said Conleth Hill, better known to “Thrones” fans as the cunning Varys. As one of the few actors from Northern Ireland in the cast — he grew up and still lives in Ballycastle — Hill has observed the show’s impact from both inside and out.

“Before the Troubles, there was loads of tourists coming through my town,” he said. “Now they’re coming again.”

The swarms figure to increase when HBO turns several former “Thrones” sets across the region into immersive tourist attractions featuring costumes, weapons and other artifacts from the show. The first, the Game of Thrones Studio Tour at Linen Mill Studios in Banbridge, is slated to open in spring 2020.

Tourism NI has aggressively courted Westeros set-jetters, creating a locations app and outfitting filming sites with information plaques for self-guided pilgrims, while keeping the many different “Thrones” tours from running afoul of HBO’s copyright lawyers. The show generates roughly $60 million per year in tourism income, said John McGrillen, the agency’s chief executive.

The agency also promotes the link between the show and the region’s artisanal heritage with projects like the enormous “Game of Thrones” Tapestry, based on the Bayeux Tapestry in France; it uses Belfast’s world-famous linen-weaving expertise to depict the “Thrones” story.

I saw it at the Ulster Museum, a few floors above an exhibition about the Troubles. The 217-foot-long tapestry recaps the entire tale, from King Robert’s arrival at Winterfell in the pilot to the zombie dragon Viserion demolishing the Wall in the Season 7 finale. (The artists will extend it to add the rest of the story after “Thrones” ends.) Much like the show itself, the tapestry is fundamentally bonkers but astounding in scale and execution, and a tremendous kick to experience.

A still more immersive wallow in “Thrones”-dom awaited me at Castle Ward, about an hour south of the city. Guide William Van der Kells greeted me in full Northern regalia: a black cloak and faux fur collar with a shiny gauntlet on one hand, holding a large sword made of “the finest Valyrian rubber.” A longtime National Trust site, Castle Ward added a “Winterfell tour” after the show shot much of the first season on the property, and promptly brought in more than 25,000 additional visitors a year.

The Stark castle was based around the 1610 tower house, the same one Bran climbed to discover Jaime and Cersei in flagrante twincestus. We shot arrows on the spot in the courtyard the Stark children did in one of the first scenes of the series, a few yards from where Tyrion smacked Joffrey in one of the show’s most GIF-able moments. Then we drove through a driving rain to other locations on the property, like the tree where Robb Stark and Talisa fatefully tied the knot, before taking cover beneath an old castle near the site of Walder Frey’s (digitally projected) one, where it all ended badly. “Around here you get all four seasons in a day,” Van der Kells said.

By then, I was wearing the cloak and snapping my own selfies to send to my daughter. The only shadow monster in evidence was the storm cloud dumping rain on me. But as I peered through the gloom and fog at the choppy Strangford Lough, it occurred to me that while I’d come to see how “Game of Thrones” had redefined Northern Ireland, what struck me most was how Northern Ireland had defined it.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/arts/television/game-of-thrones-locations.html" id="40328a3a-c059-39f6-ad8e-9323c96e9540">The New York Times</a>.

'Game of Thrones' Is Ending. But You Can Still Visit Westeros.

CUSHENDUN, Northern Ireland — The many marvels dotting the dramatic Antrim Coast of Northern Ireland include a cluster of eerily beautiful caves in this tidy village, around 45 miles north of Belfast. Formed by 400 million years of shifting red stone and the surging slate-blue Irish Sea, the caves inspire awed reflection upon the raw power of nature and the irresistible imprint of time, among other musings on the mystic.

Bran Stark (3-to-1 odds)

How is Bran the favorite? He can’t fight or even carry on a functional conversation — how could he possibly beat out everyone else for the throne? But couldn’t that also be an argument in his favor on a show that has consistently striven for surprise? Bran’s egoless omniscience could be just what the realm needs after years of toxically self-interested and vindictive leadership. All hail King Three-Eye, the first of his name.

Jon Snow (3.5-1)

Jon is the New England Patriots of this contest: The obvious favorite and most boring choice. But the Patriots have lost nearly as many Super Bowls as they’ve won.

Daenerys Targaryen (5-1)

She has dragons and the strongest will to power, aside from perhaps the irredeemably doomed Cersei. But she’s also shown enough of her father’s crazy streak to make you wonder if she’ll self-destruct before she wins the big prize.

Sansa Stark (6-1)

Once one of the most feckless people in this story, Sansa might actually be the best equipped to rule the Seven Kingdoms at this point. But given how things went for her the last time she was in King’s Landing, would she want to go back? The case in favor: She’s shown a desire to lead, in her interactions with Jon at Winterfell, and she can be ice-cold when it’s called for, as with the executions of Ramsay and Littlefinger.

Gendry (7-1)

He rowed for like four years and has the guns to prove it. His Baratheon blood also gives him a decent claim on the throne. But are they really going to give it to a guy who’s had maybe 11 minutes of screen time?

The Night King (10-1)

The popular choice among nihilists and environmentalists who have gone all-in on the White-Walkers-as-climate-change metaphor. But George R.R. Martin has said the ending will be “bittersweet,” not “weird and deflating."

Tyrion Lannister (10-1)

He's come a long way from his drinking and knowing things days. But doesn’t the final act of his moral awakening seem destined to be a noble, gut-wrenching sacrifice?

Jonerys offspring to be named later (14-1)

Season 7’s finale suggested Dany might get pregnant with her nephew Jon’s child, and with that bloodline, the tyke would be one of the most powerful people in this story. But based on the reigns of Joffrey and Tommen, the show seems to take a dim view of incest baby rulers.

Littlefinger (14-1)

A theory making the rounds online maintains that the man we saw Arya kill in the Season 7 finale was not actually Littlefinger, but a Faceless Man he hired to take his place. Stranger things have happened on this show, I guess. At any rate, the interest in this has apparently been strong enough to get him on the board.

Arya Stark (14-1)

Samwell Tarly (14-1)

Cersei Lannister (25-1)

Sure there’s a big zombie battle coming soon to settle, you know, the fate of humankind. But there’s also the matter of the actual game of thrones. And there are plenty of places ready and willing to make it a little more interesting, as they say. These are the top 12 contenders to rule the realm at the end of “Game of Thrones,” in order of probability, according to the gambling site OddsShark.

Jeremy Egner

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