re: I'm a weak man, I caved and re-watched Game of Thrones. Where it went off the rails...

I was going to write a fairly long post about what went wrong with GoT, but I think I can sum it up more easily by using this example: the end of the first book and of Season One of the show has one of the best swerves of all time when Ned, the guy you assume is the main character of the series, is OH MY GOD THEY KILLED SEAN BEAN!!! This works because there were books/seasons to come in which they could expand on that initial chapter to tell an even bigger and more interesting story.

The way they ended the show felt the same as if they had stopped with the last episode of Season One, and never done anything else. Important plot threads that had been set up were just left there, dangling, while the character we thought the show was actually about was (figuratively, in this case) killed off.