The good (and bad) people of Westeros may have been told that 'Winter is here' in the season six finale, but for producers, winter is dragging its heels and that means we're not going to be seeing the seventh series for even longer than expected.
Traditionally, the show shoots from mid-summer through to as late as mid-winter, but seeing as all of Westeros will need to look as wintry as possible, producers have pushed back production times to film in colder weather. We're sure the cast will be thrilled about that.
Speaking in an interview with the UFC Unfiltered podcast, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss said:
"We don’t have an air date yet. We’re starting a bit later because at the end of this season, ‘Winter is here’ - and that means that sunny weather doesn’t really serve our purposes any more. So we kind of pushed everything down the line, so we could get some grim, grey weather even in the sunnier places that we shoot."
And what that means for us is that we're probably not going to be seeing new episodes until well into 2017, much later than the usual April to June slot the show occupies.
Combine that with the fact that season seven is only going to be seven episodes long and it's like a knife in the chest, a feeling Thrones fans are much too familiar with.