Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff knows how it is when everyone but you is in on some great new show. “I didn’t start watching Breaking Bad until Season Three or Four,” he says. “It was a certain weight of dozens of friends telling you how great it is, and at first you’re like, ‘Yeah, sounds good, I don’t have time.’ Then, finally, enough people say it, and you start feeling like a dipshit for not watching.” When he got into the saga of Walter White at last, he loved it. Now he calls Breaking Bad “probably the most consistently great show in history.”

A few million viewers have gone through a similar game of catch-up with the Sunday-night HBO series overseen by Benioff and his fellow executive producer, Dan Weiss (D. B. Weiss in the credits). Almost three million people watched the first Game of Thrones episode, at nine P.M. on April 17, 2011; the number of live viewers was up to 5.4 million for the third season’s final episode, on June 9, 2013. Along the way Game of Thrones has been illegally downloaded more than any other series: 5.9 million people bootlegged last year’s finale, according to the digital-piracy news site TorrentFreak.

The show has won 10 Emmys (out of 40 nominations) and counts President Obama among its fans. Asked over e-mail if the White House receives screeners of Game of Thrones episodes before the rest of us, Benioff and Weiss jointly reply: “One perk of being the most powerful man in the world: yes, you get to see episodes early.”

Based on “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the epic series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, the show seemed like an odd fit for HBO. But Benioff and Weiss believed it was in the tradition of The Sopranos, Deadwood, Oz, and other HBO shows in that it would breathe new life into a tired or maligned genre. It wasn’t an easy task, though, to persuade executives that something belonging to a category that includes Xena: Warrior Princess was right for the crown jewel of premium cable. “That was one of the big uphill sells,” Weiss says. “It was just a question of convincing them that it applied to a genre that had never seriously crossed their minds before.”

“We ended up writing them this letter, like a five-page letter,” Benioff says, “explaining why this would work in terms of: ‘This is what you guys do, whether it’s taking the cop show, with The Wire, or gangster shows, with The Sopranos, and making them dirty and re-inventing them.’ But no one had really done fantasy in that way.”

Obama’s appreciation of Game of Thrones makes sense when you realize that, beneath its bawdy, bloody trappings, the series is about power: how to get it and how to keep it. It’s like something Robert Caro might have come up with in a fever dream. And in the world of the show, those who have the most ideological flexibility tend to do better than those who are bound by principle.

The fat, earthy Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy) is king at the show’s outset. He is like many modern-day politicians in that his appetites prove to be his undoing: he starts to lose his hold on power largely because of his penchant for the bottle and the hunt. The lords and ladies who try to elevate themselves after his death employ different strategies not unfamiliar to anyone who has paid attention to the last few political cycles. We have Robert’s brother, Renly Baratheon (Gethin Anthony), a lovable charmer who bothers to remember the names of lesser men. His brother Stannis (Stephen Dillane) gets his power from a combination of religious zealotry and hard-heartedness, perhaps like certain red-state politicians in our time. Members of the Stark clan, rather touchingly, cling to the notion that they will advance if they do the honorable thing—only to come to grisly ends, like Ned Stark (Sean Bean), who is beheaded, and his son Robb (Richard Madden), who is stabbed in the heart. The silver-haired beauty Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) wins followers through her messianic charisma (also: dragons). Behind the throne, like some prototypical National Security Agency, there is Varys (Conleth Hill), a shadowy, soft-spoken eunuch, who has numerous spies in his charge.