Do we like D.B. Weiss?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing hateful found in his own words, one genuinely contested project, and not much documented good, so a solid but cautious seven.
Weiss is half of the Benioff and Weiss writing team that ran Game of Thrones for HBO, and the show's final season is still the thing most fans bring up. He and Benioff said in a 2024 Hollywood Reporter interview that they had planned for around seven seasons since season two, so the rush wasn't a surprise to them. Weiss also admitted that even glowing feedback leaves him feeling “weird and teeth-grindy and on edge”, so he stopped searching his own name.
The bigger controversy is Confederate, the alternate-history drama about a slave-holding Southern nation that the pair announced in 2017. The backlash was immediate, with critics asking why two white showrunners were the ones telling this story. Benioff called the outrage “a little premature” because no scripts had been written, and admitted they might get it wrong. The show never made it to air, and it was later reported as stalled.
On the harm check, we found no hateful words, no campaigning against any group and no donations to causes that push harm in anything we could verify. He has not, as far as the reporting shows, built a persona around grievance. Confederate earns an asterisk because the project was criticised as tone-deaf on race, but that is a creative misjudgement the critics argued about rather than a campaign. His recent work is the Netflix sci-fi series 3 Body Problem, and no harmful company turned up there.
On the stuff that makes someone a good bloke, he comes out fine on what we can see. He and Benioff turned down guaranteed producer credits, and the payments that came with them, on Game of Thrones spinoffs including House of the Dragon. Weiss's reasoning was that “there is such a thing as free money” would be a lie, in the sense that a hands-off credit would bring strain that wasn't worth it. That is a principled call, not a charity case, but it is the kind of thing worth noting.
They also walked away from a Star Wars film trilogy in 2019 and signed a reported 250 million dollar Netflix deal. Trade reports said Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy was unhappy and the visions had diverged, and that the pair did not want another decade under fan scrutiny after the Thrones finale; all of that came through anonymous sources. Both sides publicly called the split amicable.
The honest gap is that we found no court cases, no accusations of mistreating anyone, and also no charity work or kind acts documented by established outlets. Weiss keeps a low public profile, so the record is mostly his work. That is why this is a lean yes rather than a loud one.