Whose show was it, really?
Game of Thrones had hundreds of characters. But when you measure every second of screen time across 73 episodes, the hierarchy becomes clear.
Tyrion Lannister, not Jon Snow, not Daenerys, spent the most time on screen. 685 minutes. That is more than 11 hours of television devoted to one character.
In 73 episodes, characters died 6,887 times on screen. The escalation was not gradual.
Arya Stark is the deadliest human character in the series with 1,278 kills, including the Night King himself. The only entities with higher body counts are the undead Wights and the dragon Drogon.
Behind the body count, named characters met their end. Here are 55 of the most significant. Some were villains. Some were heroes. All of them mattered to someone watching.
Of the 30 characters with the most screen time, 17 were dead by the final episode. The show gave them voice, presence, story. Then took it all away.
Screen time data sourced from Jeffrey Lancaster's scene-level dataset, calculated from scene start/end timestamps across all 73 episodes.
Death data compiled from the Washington Post / data.world dataset, cross-referenced with episode-level kill counts. Named character deaths include characters of importance level 3 or higher.
Viewership figures from Nielsen ratings. IMDb ratings from public episode data. All data reflects events as depicted in the HBO television series, not the books.