HBO Announces Game of Thrones Aftershow

Not only do fans like to talk about their favorite TV shows, they also really like to listen to other people talk about them. That's the idea behind the aftershow concept, and one of the most talked-about series on TV has decided it needs one. This week, HBO announced that it will produce an aftershow series for Game of Thrones, in which hosts Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan will discuss the series' current episode and offer speculation about upcoming episodes.

The series will be titled, imaginatively, After the Thrones, and it will be produced by Bill Simmons. Greenwald and Ryan are already known to GoT fans from their podcast Watch the Thrones

The idea of the after-show discussion has been around for a long time. Discovery produced the miniseries After The Catch, a discussion of its popular Deadliest Catch series, back in 2007, but that series was a stand-alone product. The same-night aftershow was popularized more recently with the AMC series Talking Bad and Talking Dead, which followed episodes of Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, respectively. The GoT afterhow, however, will air the day after each first-run episode, not immediately afterwards.

Aftershows have proven very popular with audiences, and it's no surprise that HBO would want to cash in on the two-for-one opportunity that a low-budget, easy-to-produce aftershow offers.