But my time with “Game of Thrones,” while far from stressless, felt closer to reading. It’s based on the first five novels in George R.R. Martin’s series “A Song of Ice and Fire.” So you can actually read this story, too, at least until the production ran out of books. But as I made my way through the show, I spent a lot of time thinking about whose viewing relationship was healthier. It would take as long as a month to read Martin’s novels (yes, people have read them in less), and you’d need more than 100 hours to complete Robert A. Caro’s four books about Lyndon B. Johnson.

Instead of living and dying a little over the span of eight years, my little deaths and rebirths occurred in about five weeks. HBO doesn’t have commercials. Subscribers are part of its bottom line, and this show became a subscription driver. So an excellent piece of pop art — another one — got stretched by the maddening rack of commerce. Of course, I don’t get my five weeks without those eight years. Nonetheless, that’s a long time to carry all of the ardor, anticipation and fury that come with watching this show. And the eternal waits between seasons can seem a cruel amount of time to harbor resentment, as many people apparently do, about the show’s momentary, yet monumental, bait-and-switch from throne-gaming into large digital-looking armies charging at each other; into impalings, decapitations and infernal dragon breath.

More than one person who found out about my compressed viewing window expressed the kind of wistful envy I imagine the people of Westeros will one day lay on the young prophet, Brandon Stark: You remember who everybody is. I do — just about. But I also have no claim on this show. I don’t feel like it’s mine. Eight years of it haven’t lured me into a sense of ownership or familiarity. (I, at least, don’t feel like I’ve known Daenerys Targaryen — a.k.a. “Mother of Dragons,” a.k.a. “Protector of the Realm,” a.k.a. “Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea,” a.k.a. “Breaker of Chains,” a.k.a. Godzilla — long enough to be calling her “Dany” out in these streets.)

It had been fun to experience “Game of Thrones” as a bystander. The things that reached me about the show really stuck. I knew the meaning of “Hodor” before I’d ever seen the character himself. I’d heard about the dragons and the zombies. I knew that somebody saw fit to hire Jason Momoa to plant a flag of molten hotness. The aforementioned blood bath, dubbed the Red Wedding, sounded bad. (It was actually so much better than that — a nightmare achievement in horror-movie terror.) I had been watching the show secondhand and sometimes only because it was on at somebody’s house. The night the punitive religious fanatics made Cersei Lannister walk nude through her own kingdom, I was pestering a date with ludicrousness: Why’s the cast of “Sister Act” singing “shame” at her like that. (Earl, I can now say that I would have kicked me out, too.)