So, I Watched The First Season Of Game Of Thrones

I had the opportunity to watch the first season of Game of Thrones on DVD--not Bluray, if that matters.  (I also read the first three books; more on that in a minute.)  Watching the show, I got a huge Dune vibe from it.  It really felt like a cheesy science fiction story, especially because of  all the talk of 8,000 year old castles and ice walls and other silly shit.  Fantasy, schmatasy, all the bullshit they were slinging around was seriously low-budget scifi.  Mostly, the first season--the first episode, even--showed that they had four really compelling actors, and fuck the books, the complete GoT tee vee show story should have featured 006, Fred Flinstone, Ronon Dex, and Peter Dinklage for as long as they could keep the show going.  The most thrilling revelation of the first episodes was Mark Addy's fucking brilliant work as King Robert; the deal with Martin should have been sweetened with an extra $100 Olive Garden gift card to allow the HBO producers to give up the dumb story of the novels and make a show where Ned Stark, Robert Baratheon, Drogo, and Tyrion Lannister go around the world and fuck up all the people in the endless, and ultimately pointless, books.  If the fangirls and other assorted dweeby assholes bitched too loudly, they could have a secondary story for the kids with the dragon girl with the nice ass and the bastard kid solving mysteries or riding dragons on Pern or something, but let's face it, the rest of the actors on that show are pretty shitty once you get past Bean, Addy, Momoa, and Dinklage.  (I get that Charles Dance and the guy who plays Bronn and the luminous Gwendoline Christie come later and are awesome, but they weren't there at the beginning, so fuck them.)  Seriously, the characterizations in the book are pretty thin and beyond hackneyed, but as tee vee people, if you couldn't see the problem ditching 75% of your most amazing actors after 10 episodes, well, we can see what happens, unfortunately.  I was able to watch the shows one after the other, but if I had been forced to wait a week between, I think I would have forgotten all about it and been none the worse off.

I blew through the first three books, too.  All I can say is that the writers who crank out Harlequin romance novels must be pissed they aren't getting tee vee money as well.  I know George R.R. Martin thinks he's writing an epic story about brutality and harsh politics in a harsher world, but what he's really done is write a shitload of interminably tedious books filled with trite and clumsy word salad that are much less believable and much less entertaining than The Young and the Restless.