It is not pleasant to be exhaustedly staring at a laptop while under pressure to write about the most popular story in the world in a way that will make sense to a million-plus readers.

But the Mondays were pretty grand, when the writing was done and the conversation was just beginning.

Delving into “Thrones” was rewarding creatively and — as the show’s popularity grew exponentially — emotionally. It’s a rare gift to be a prominent voice within a global conversation, especially in a time defined by sociopolitical Balkanization.

Each week the scolders took the time and effort to declaim, in the comments section and elsewhere, the sweeping obsession with what was “just a TV show.” But what those people failed to recognize, I think, was that a significant source of the shared obsession was the sharing.

By the end of the show’s run, when each recap was drawing well over a thousand comments, scores of the same people were coming back to The Times’s website week after week to commiserate and argue about each episode. The occasional broadside notwithstanding, I gleaned nothing about most commenters’ personal politics or religion or other definitional flash points.

Culture can do that sometimes — give people a venue where they can think about what they value and debate those values with others, without descending into the tribal bickering that shapes so much of our modern discourse. (Or at least without descending all the way into it.) TV, with its long-running structure made up of weekly installments, is a better venue than most for this kind of conversation.

Much of the talk around the final season of “Game of Thrones” was about how — given the splintering of pop culture and the continued rise of streaming TV, in which everyone watches on their own schedules — the show might be the last of its kind: a proverbial water cooler that drew millions together to parse the latest turn or compare theories and themes or just complain about Daenerys’s big character swerve. (This season it often felt as though the water cooler were filled with haterade.)