How to optimize your TV for 'Game of Thrones' so you don't miss any details

It's not just you: "Game of Thrones" has gotten intentionally darker as the seasons have progressed.

"In season seven, of course, winter is here," Robert McLachlan, a cinematographer, told INSIDER in 2017. "In the past, we had the shutters open out of necessity for the day interior [scenes] in Winterfell or Castle Black or Eastwatch, so that some daylight could make its way in. That was your primary lighting source. There was this rule there that nobody in this world would burn candles in the daytime because they're a luxury item, they're far too expensive."

By season eight, the show is at peak darkness — a reflection of the show's world, where winter has arrived.

One simple solution: Turn up the brightness setting on your television. If nothing else, this will help with details in especially dark scenes.

Beware, of course, not to go too crazy with the brightness — you risk completely washing out the image, and that's no good for anyone.

Turning up your brightness will only get you so far — it's contrast, which controls the disparity between white levels and black levels, that will help get you closer to something balanced. After turning up the brightness, head over to the contrast setting and turn it down.

Ideally, a balance of the two will help to make the entire scene brighter without getting too washed out.

The only way to find out how it's all going to look is to test your tweaked settings against the show itself. But instead of trying to fiddle around with settings on Sunday night, you should load up the second episode of season eight and use it as a measuring stick.

Maybe use a few especially dimly lit moments from Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen talking in the Winterfell crypt, and contrast it with a brighter moment to see how washed out the details are.

Many TVs have a variety of preset viewing modes — Night Mode or Game Mode or Sports Mode — that do a bunch of the fine-tuning for you.

Sometimes they work out great, and sometimes they're less great. They're worth giving a shot regardless. If nothing else, these different modes aim to quickly demonstrate the spectrum of picture settings on your TV.

They are also, frankly, much easier than tweaking individual settings and trying to balance each. Unfortunately, that ease of use comes a lack of customization — it's a tradeoff — but many TVs allow finer tuning after selecting a preset.