10 TV Shows That Got Better After The Main Character's Death

2. Game Of Thrones - Ned Stark

Bates Motel
HBO

By the time Games of Thrones rolled to a close in 2019, the vast majority of the HBO juggernaut's headline attractions had been killed off along the way.

Taking the prestigious honour of being the first main Thrones character to die, of course, was Sean Bean's Ned Stark.

While it's become a running joke that Bean must die in whatever he appears in, Thrones felt, well, different. In how the marketing of this series was handled, Ned was the glue that held so much of the show together up until he was beheaded in Thrones' ninth episode.

The second-to-last outing for the series' debut year, Baelor shocked us all - well, bar those who'd read George R.R. Martin's source material - by killing off the person who was absolutely positioned as the show's lead figure.

Some may not have been happy with how Game of Thrones concluded, but there's no doubt the series went from strength to strength in the aftermath of Ned's death - becoming one of the most must-see TV shows of all time.

The beheading of Ned Stark not only helped to push so much of the future narrative of Thrones - particularly in how his children all grow - but it hammered home to audiences that all bets were off when it came to this burgeoning behemoth of a show.

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