I watched the first two and half seasons of GoT then gave up. People praise the performances but outside of a couple of characters I don't really think many stand out. I'd rather watch one well developed character than a million one note characters. And maybe it's just because I'm English, but Kit Harrington's god awful pseudo northern accent is like nails on a chalkboard.
The idea that it is mature TV is completely lost on me as well. For some reason contemporary culture seems to think humourless is a synonym of mature. GoT has some of the most adolescent attitudes towards women, race and politics on TV. There's nothing wrong with enjoying tits and dragons, but call it like it is.
The shows attitude towards violence makes it impossible to care. If the characters unblinkingly accept that rape and murder are par for the course, then why should we care when we watch it? That's how their universe works. Maybe I'm just jaded, but as an adult concepts like incest and murder and torture and rape aren't shocking as abstract concepts, I've long understood what those things are and that unfortunately they occur. And if we are just supposed to be shocked because those things are horrible in real life, then we also can't just accept all of the noble savage imagery and misogynistic bullshit as just being part of their universe, which makes so many depictions in the show problematic. Depicting atrocities is not the same as exploring the ethical, social, emotional or psychological implications.
It's structured like the old Batman show too. Season one has a anticlimactic cliffhanger after nearly every episode, boy gets thrown out of window and he couldn't possibly survive, next episode: he did. He's injured, but he did. If boy wakes up he might spill the incest beans, boy wakes up but doesn't bother saying anything. Dwarf gets locked in room he can only get out of by plummeting to his death, gets let out and leaves with ease.
I don't know, but it's not for me.
And if we are talking golden age of television, I would say that was describing the early to mid naughts when America caught on to the benefits of serialised television and we saw the release of The Wire and The Sopranos and Deadwood etc, or you could even argue for a little bit earlier with Buffy and Babylon 5. Now we just seem to have a lot of television, and a lot of it is just as bad as it ever was except everything is serialised even when it doesn't gain anything from the form.
It's so strange that we live in a time when technology has apparently given everyone these short attention spans yet people think it's reasonable to commit twenty hours of their finite time plowing through a couple of seasons of a middling TV series waiting for it to get good.
That being said, just to quickly undermine myself, I think it's a bit too early to tell with Discovery. I'm not sure where it's going but there have been equal parts things I dislike and things I like. I have found it entertaining though.
TL;DR Thrones is okay, but hugely problematic and more than a little boring. Disco, too early to tell.