Well, the “Game of Thrones” prequel contest is over, and should it have been called “Game of Prequels.”

Earlier yesterday came new that a prequel starring Naomi Watts, set thousands of years before the Emmy winning series, had been scrapped. HBO filmed the pilot, then said forget it.

But that show wasn’t from series creator and novelist George R. R. Martin. So now that series, called “House of Dragons,” has been approved and will go straight to series.

This had nothing to do with Naomi Watts or even the quality of that first show. It’s just about politics, and the fact that Martin is involved in “House of Dragons,” and HBO is in business with him. It was all about who would sit on the throne of Prequels.

It’s pretty obvious, though, why one show worked and the other didn’t: dragons. “House” will tell the story of Dany Targaryen’s family 300 years before “Game of Thrones.” Even though two of the three dragons died at the end of “Thrones,” back in this story there will be dragons. Lots of them. In the Naomi Watts series, there were none. And people want to see dragons.

What will Westeros look like 300 years before the story we already know? Those poor people didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing when we met them. Can you imagine the primitive version? Yikes. No dry cleaning for all those costumes! And incest? Hah!

Yes, it’s true. “The Walking Dead” has found a new low ratings milestone.

The once blockbuster tribute to zombies and the people who love them sank again on Sunday. Their total viewership was 3,305,000.

Negan and pals were not the most watched cable show in their time period, either. That distinction fell to a “90 Day Fiance” Special on TLC.

Maybe it’s time to fix Negan up with a new betrothed, definitely a zombie, and see if their families approve of the union. “90 Day Fiance” scored 3.340 million. It’s a just few more people, but they all heads and full dental work (which you can’t always say for people on reality shows).

Elsewhere at 9pm, the Kardashians had just 916,000 viewers on the E! channel, and most of them were actual zombies. HBO’s excellent “Watchmen” series at 9pm brought in 765,000 fans. But that series is just warming up. Whereas the others are over cooked.

The much ballyhooed prequel to “Game of Thrones” at HBO isn’t happening. They made the pilot with Naomi Watts, among other, sets thousands of years in the fictional past of Westeros. But I guess it didn’t work, no liked it, and now it’s history.

I’m not surprised. This would have been costly, and the new owners of HBO aren’t taking chances. If the new show wasn’t obviously right, forget it.

There’s another spin off of “Thrones” being planned with George R.R. Martin involved. But who knows what shape that’s in, and Martin still owes us one more book he never finished. Everyone asks him about  it, and he kind of shrugs.

This new cancellation comes on the heels of “Thrones” producers DB Weiss and David Benioff getting out of their deal to make a “Star Wars” trilogy. It’s a coincidence, surely. But there are no coincidences. Studios are trying to cash in on brands known to the public. But it’s hard to catch lightning in a bottle a second time for anyone.

What might work is an actual “Thrones” spin off with characters everyone knows, an “AfterMASH,” so to speak. But Weiss and Benioff blew that when they killed Dany and sent Jon Snow into the woods. I guess we could have “Sansa Stark 2.0” with Tyrion Lannister running the general store. Or maybe breeding dragons. The problem with the cancelled pilot seems to be no dragons. And that’s a drag.

Well, I liked “The Morning Show.” Apparently, I was alone.

The Jennifer Aniston-Reese Witherspoon soap opera about network television has a 59 on Rotten Tomatoes. The Hollywood Reporter has a feature on how much critics don’t like it, and also why Apple TV doesn’t need to exist. That story was picked up by the Drudge Report. So now everyone knows.

Apple TV has no good will in the press. Whoever’s handling it has done such a great job that critics turned on them like a pack of wild dogs.

Still, last night, Apple threw themselves a gigantic, expensive party in Lincoln Center at what used to be Avery Fisher Hall. It’s on three or four levels, and is massive. I got pictures back from the lobbies of what one journo called “a thousand people.” They were pictures of people who I guess have iPhones. That’s how your entry was qualified.

I liked “The Morning Show.” Of course, we’ve only seen three episodes. Steve Carell is signed for all 10 episodes, and he plays a Matt Lauer- like anchor who gets fired for sexual harassment. But it does seem at the end of episode 3 that Carell’s Mitch Kessler will be redeemed, and that maybe his main accuser (Ahna O’Reilly) will turn out to be a nut. If that’s the case, then O-M-G for #metoo. That would be a twist, but not the Peppermint Twist.  It wouldn’t even be Oliver Twist saying “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall disagreed with me completely. He wrote: the show “feels like it could have aired on broadcast TV anytime in the last 15 to 20 years, so long as the profanity got cut,” and drew comparisons to HBO’s “The Newsroom,” observing “it’s Sorkin without Sorkin, lacking the snappy dialogue, the soaring rhetoric, or any attempt whatsoever to argue for why anyone should care about the future of this show-within-the-show.”

I, like many others, have no idea how to get Apple TV besides on the press site. Will it suddenly appear on Smart TVs? (Just as Amazon has left my 2013 Sony Bravia that cost a thousand dollars.) And will we ever know if anyone watches these new shows? No, we will not. And I guess it doesn’t matter. But Apple has committed $15 million each to 20 episodes. The price of that iPhone will be going up.

PS Name all the famous faces in the photo above at Apple’s Morning Show launch.