Game of Thrones season 8: HBO, what took so long?

HBO has been pretty slow to reveal this tidbit of information about Game of Thrones season 8, and frankly, that makes it all the more underwhelming.

Not to say that HBO’s been pretty late to this game, pun very much intended, and by “this game” we mean revealing when it’ll air Game of Thrones season 8, but fans who’ve been paying close attention knew that season 8 was going to air in 2019 literally a month ago.

And yet, perhaps because of the latest Television Critics Association winter press tour kicking off today, HBO saw fit to send out an official announcement and everything. But coming as it did basically out of nowhere — on a day that is supposed to belong to Fox, according to the TCA schedule — and only confirming what we already knew makes us wonder about why the decision was made to do this all now.

We’re not saying that this announcement is completely useless. Far from it. The knowledge we had came, effectively, secondhand via Sophie Turner, and while there was no reason to doubt it, additional (and more official) confirmation is never a bad thing.

But beyond that, there’s nothing here that we didn’t know before. It is, however, interesting that HBO has been playing things a bit more cautiously than before when it comes to its big shows that people talk about frequently. Case in point: Does anyone know when Westworld season 2 is supposed to premiere other than 2018?

However, Westworld is not Game of Thrones — or at least it isn’t yet, in terms of the scale of its impact on pop culture — and so HBO couldn’t have really thought that we’d all just patiently wait for them to dole out information like this, right?

Alas, it seems that that’s the case. But hey, that just means we now might have time to watch other things on Sunday nights this year.

Next: 21 pop culture moments in 2017 that spoke to the zeitgeist

Oh, who are we kidding. Anyone up for a rewatch?