Game of Thrones (season 3)
"Game of Thrones" rapidly became a critical and commercial success after it started airing in April 2011. A few days after ratings for the second season's premiere, "The North Remembers", hit a series high of 8.3 million viewers, HBO announced the show's renewal for a third season. Prior to that announcement, there had been rumors and reports that showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss planned to shoot seasons three and four simultaneously. Benioff said that this would be very efficient, but impossible to write.
Winter Is Coming
In March 2006, a few weeks after meeting Martin, Benioff and Weiss pitched the show to Showtime and Carolyn Strauss of HBO, who accepted their proposal. HBO acquired the rights to the novels to turn them into a television series, with Benioff and Weiss as writers and executive producers of the series. The series went into development in January 2007. The series would begin with the 1996 first book of "A Song of Ice and Fire", "A Game of Thrones", with the intention that each novel in the series would form the basis for a season's worth of episodes. However, Benioff and Weiss had to resubmit a proposal after Carolyn Strauss stepped down as president of HBO in 2008. The first and second drafts of the pilot script, written by Benioff and Weiss, were submitted in August 2007 and June 2008 respectively. While HBO found both drafts to their liking, a pilot was not ordered until November 2008.