We started a rewatch from season 1 the other night (it'll be something we'll slowly chip away at so I expect we'll get to the end in a couple of years!) and it's weird to see how young everyone is.
It also makes at least some of the criticisms people had about the writing and pacing in later seasons feel a tiny bit like rose tinted glasses. One example that jumped out is that there's literally a scene where a journey from Kings Landing to Winterfell happens in no time at all, they just cut forward in time. It's funny because nobody cared at the time and later seasons got a total kicking for it. Right from the beginning they only really drew out those journeys when the journeys themselves were the story.
In any case, it feels quite exciting to be watching it all again, knowing there's so much good stuff to revisit.
Really have to do this too. I didn't jump on board for a couple of seasons, and was only really catching up when the Red Wedding came around.
It's so worth it. The later seasons are certainly divisive, but seasons 1-4 are as good as TV gets. On a recent rewatch I was really struck by just how strong season 1 is. There's really no filler - almost every scene has some crucial element of characterisation or worldbuilding, or pushes the overall story forward in an important way. Every single episode has at least one major standout moment, and I think in some ways the lower budget and inability to show much action really forced them to think more about the scripting and dialogue in the early days. I also like how a lot more of the dialogue is ripped straight from the books - I'm really not keen on how the dialogue in the show got a lot more colloquial - almost contemporary - as time went on.
I don't see anyone attempting a reboot any time soon - and the petition to 'redo' season 8 is patently ridiculous - but what I'd really hope for, especially if and when the next two books get published, would be a complete redo of the audiobooks, something closer to a radio dramatisation with music, possibly even ambient sound effects etc and with either a full voice cast or at least a different actor for each POV character.
The current audiobooks are... fine, but very sloppily produced. They are full of continuity errors - mispronounciations or inconsistent pronounciations of character and place names, and though the narrator (Roy Dotrice) gamely does a separate voice performance for each character, they completely change from book to book, so for instance Arya suddenly talks like a pirate in book 4. It's incredibly distracting. He also passed away a few years ago, so they would need to find a new narrator for the remaining books anyway.