Over at The Atlantic, I'm participating in some roundtable blogging about HBO's new Game of Thrones series. I've seen the first four episodes, and here's what I thought:
Despite its setting, Game of Thrones is, as Alyssa noted, more comparable to The Wire than anything else on television. But this poses a challenge for the series that may prove difficult to meet in terms of snatching up viewers. The Wire didn't begin with the same moral ambivalence that later defined the series. To the contrary, viewers were initially encouraged to view Baltimore's drug trade through the eyes of Jimmy McNulty's quixotic attempt to bring Avon Barksdale to justice. Likewise, in Lord Eddard Stark, Martin provides a fairly traditional protagonist who helps anchor the reader through the first book. The differences in medium however, eliminate Stark's internal monologues, which are key to leading you to the meat of the story. The adaptation is so successful in imitating the tone of the books that it starts off adopting the same ambivalent approach to the main characters that Martin eases you into later on. For those of us who have read the books and are aware of the payoffs, this poses little problem. But I suspect some viewers less familiar with the world of Westeros may be frustrated trying to figure out who the good guys and bad guys are. With no obvious person to root for, the series' abrupt plunge into its rather bleak subject matter may be difficult from some viewers to suffer through.
You should also read Alyssa Rosenberg's take, as well as Nick Baumann's observation that the series' depictions of sex are pretty much as terrible as every other fantasy pic that's ever been done.
