Season 8, Episode 1, ‘Winterfell’

On Sunday, we finally returned to an era-defining show, gone for years, that captivated the world with its high-stakes melodrama woven from familiar human fallibility.

That show was “Downton Abbey.” Because in the long-awaited Season 8 premiere of “Game of Thrones,” from the grand royal arrival onward, Winterfell resembled nothing so much as that great Edwardian manse of swollen emotion. Charged reunions, new conflicts and old grudges played themselves out upstairs and downstairs, inside and out, between siblings and exes, old friends and in-laws, much of it rippling outward from a haughty noblewoman no one liked all that much.

Granted, I don’t recall Lady Mary ever incinerating anyone’s brother, as Daenerys did to poor Dickon Tarly last season. And instead of the dowager countess’s bon mots, we got Bran, just sitting there creeping everybody out.

Overall it was a somewhat soapy but generally very satisfying setup for the final run of “Game of Thrones,” as the sides coalesced for the wars to come. Jon and Dany’s coalition of the living currently includes nearly everyone not named or sleeping with Cersei. She heads up the King’s Landing faction, and this week welcomed a mysterious new man — Capt. Strickland, leader of the Golden Company — onto the team and Euron into her bed, while inviting more speculation about her purported pregnancy with the departed Jaime.