I apologise for turning my back on Game of Thrones
When I was watching it for its bulk, I found it really quite dark and entertaining, but I started criticising it in the last season for ruining all that came before.
Well, GRRM's books were used for half of the eight seasons and it was AWESOME then, and the rest was based on his notes which were OK, but the writers Benioff and Weiss just lost patience in the last season and turned in a whole bunch of nonsensical CRAP because they thought they'd have a Star Wars trilogy on their hands, but it never came to be and thus GoT suffered at the end.
But to be honest, I LOVED LOVED LOVED all the early stuff and don't consider it in any way wasted time. I think it's just that if a literary work is incomplete, this sort of thing is bound to happen with an adaptation for TV: if the original writers notes aren't there or enough, then the writers will make up any old shit. Case in point: Rings of Power, and Tolkien NEVER wrote ANY of that!