"Game of Thrones" is a juggernaut that seems to have conquered every corner of the internet and pop culture.
While the show's season seven finale set a series record with 16.5 million viewers, "Game of Thrones" has always done well in ratings. But that doesn't mean all critics were sold when the show first came out. In fact, there were a few high-profile outlets that panned the show's first season, including The New York Times.
The criticisms ranged from totally valid concerns about pacing, to some pretty low blows like comparing it to the Broadway musical "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark." Ouch!
Here are the best bad reviews that "Game of Thrones" season one got, which we found via Rotten Tomatoes:
SEE ALSO: 7 things you can expect from the 8th and final season of 'Game of Thrones'
"'Game of Thrones' serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea..."
"'Game of Thrones' is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half ... [It] serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot. If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary."
"It is to television what the Spider-Man musical is to Broadway."
"'Game of Thrones,' one of the supposed biggies this spring, is a big letdown. Why is it so convoluted and punishing? It is to television what the Spider-Man musical is to Broadway."
"There are unscalable slabs of expositionistic dialogue clogging the forward movement of the story."
"[It's] quasi-medieval, dragon-ridden fantasy crap ... There are unscalable slabs of expositionistic dialogue clogging the forward movement of the story. Sonorous and/or schmaltzy talk substitutes for the revelation of character through action. There is the sense of intricacy having been confused with intrigue and of a story transferred all too faithfully from its source and thus not transformed to meet the demands of the screen."
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