Game of Thrones (HBO)

Eh can’t get search to work or I woulda found the earlier thread. But the good news is… HBO has officially greenlit Game of Thrones!

HBO Green-Lights Martin’s Thrones

HBO has given a green light to production on the pilot for a fantasy drama series, Game of Thrones, based on a book series by George R.R. Martin, Variety reported.

The pilot for the long-gestating project was written by feature scribes David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Former HBO entertainment president Carolyn Strauss will serve as a co-executive producer, along with Guymon Cassidy, Vincent Gerardis and author Martin.

HBO acquired the TV adaptation rights to Martin’s Songs of Ice and Fire book series nearly two years ago.

The pilot for the HBO series is described as an exploration of an epic struggle for power set in a vast and violent fantasy kingdom.

SPOILER WARNING:

THIS IS THE MOTHER OF ALL FREAKING GAME OF THRONES SPOILER THREADS.

DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARTAKING IN THIS THREAD IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE LATEST BOOK IN THE SERIES.

— Alan

Woo!

Although … another excuse for Martin to not finish the series :/.

Hm. I wonder if it will have nudity and graphic violence in it.

This is HBO, afterall.

Wonderful! I may just have to subscribe to HBO here in 2009 now.

How wrong is it that I am really hoping for a hot, twin sex scene? Yeah, that’s pretty wrong. Forbidden love FTW!

The Lannister sex scenes would be great, especially since they’re supposed to be hot and all.

As for Tyrion? Not so much. It’s bad enough that he gets more sex scenes than anyone else. Worse still that his scenes happen to be extremely graphic compared to the others, which seem incredibly mild.

I doubt you’d see it before 2010.

— Alan

Sweet!

So which will come first: Dance with Dragons, or the series?

The series. Martin does not have a long and glorious history of getting things done. Quite the opposite, in fact. One book per 5 years, if we’re lucky. In the meantime, I’ve grown to love Steven Erikson’s books.

Pretty good analysis of this here.

But before the series can get on the air, the producers first have to slay a more formidable threat than any dragon: pilot competitors. HBO has 10 other pilots in contention for series orders. Though the network declines to project how many shows will receive an order since HBO doesn’t need to fill a specific number of time-periods like broadcasters, at least six are expected to get a pickup.

Also, the success of “True Blood” may work in “Thrones’” favor. HBO has always sought to defy any sort of specific genre branding for their network, emphasizing that each project is judged on its own merits. Yet given how the vampire drama continues to gain viewers, and how Showtime’s swords-and-monarchy historical drama “The Tudors” has performed strongly, it’s not unreasonable to believe the network may see “Thrones” as a good fit.

Ugh. I wish they’d wait until he finishes the bloody series. I’d hate to have another Deadwood come out of HBO.

I, too, turned to Steven Erikson after waiting so long for Martin to get more work done (oh, plus I thought Feast For Crows just sat there on the page like a dead fish on the surface of a stagnant pond) and I’m much happier in the world of Malaz than Westeros.

Don’t suck. Don’t suck. Don’t suck.

So what’re the rules in showing minors having sex?

The show wont last for more than a season because period dramas always cost way too much money to produce due to the sets and makeup. Unless they make it shitty like Xena.

Hey, Xena was hot…ok well just a little really…

I think we will never see the last book.

Erikson started a bit rough, with characters that seemed rather pale compared to Martin’s work, but Erikson’s evolved since then (since the second book, in fact. Deadhouse Gates is awesome) and I’ve since become much more connected to some of his characters than I have with Martin’s in the long term.

I think much of that has to do with the pacing (Come on, give me another Tyrion chapter god damn it. What’s this? A new POV about a character I don’t care about? Say it isn’t so, Martin! Say it isn’t so!) and the fact that Martin has a nasty tendency of having characters you’re attached to die ignoble deaths.

That’s not to say that Martin is bad or anything. He’s got some freaking awesome scenes that contrast sharply to the rest of the book, because of how action packed they are and stuff like the sword fight in Book 3 or the stabbity stab in Book 1. Or hell, the dinner. It’s right up there with Erikson’s Shield Anvil stuff.

But yeah, it’s pacing. Erikson pretty much keeps you gripped to the edge of your seat and he doesn’t disappoint. You know that your favorite character’s turn to come won’t be long as you’re reading through another one of your favorite characters. By the time you’re done with one character and he switches to the next you’ll actually be wishing that he’d kept writing about that one character, and then you feel that way about the next, and so on. It’s great.

Martin on the other hand might take about 200 pages for you to get back to Tyrion or Arya or something and that’s just annoying because you don’t know what the hell happened during all that time. And some of his POV characters are uninteresting, so it doesn’t help.

One of my favorite things about Martin, he’s just about the only fantasy author I’ve ever read where I couldn’t predict what was going to happen 50 pages into the book.

I agree, this is one of the things I like the most about the series. It grounds the story more, and makes it less of a “unicorns and rainbows” story.

Same here. One of the worst thing about fantasy books is that, no matter what, the hero is going to make it out alive.

Not so with George R. R. Martin.

“Surely he will be fi…THWACK …oh damn…”