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[swan_tower]

A Review of the Game of Thrones TV Series Premiere, As Written by Someone Not Starting from a Position of A Priori Contempt For the Fantasy Genre

(LJ won't let me have a post title that long.)

I thought it was pretty good. The three of us watching who had read the books thought it was a faithful and effective adaptation of the source material; the fourth member of the audience, who had not read the books, said it succeeded at getting her interested, which is what you want from a premiere. Lots of good casting choices, and because it's a series, it can take the time it needs to build up the characters and the world by methods more gradual than Ye Olde Info-Dumpe.

It being HBO, of course, they were not shy about showing you the nekkid, and things that were faintly disturbing on the page become moreso when you actually see them happening. (In particular, it's hard to miss how problematic the Dothraki are.) But I didn't feel they were gratuitously amping the R-rated stuff up just for the sake of spectacle, which is my usual HBO complaint.

I definitely want to see more. Though we'll probably go the route of recording several eps and then watching them in one go, rather than doling it out an hour each week.



And that, New York Times, is how you do it. You get a reviewer who actually likes the genre to give you an opinion. Not somebody who is convinced of the worthlessness of fantasy before they ever sit down to watch the show. Please remedy this error in the future.

Comments

[cepetit.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Given what the NYT has done in reviewing written speculative fiction over the years (hint: the current occasional reviewer is worse, but not much worse, than his longtime predecessor, who had the opposite problem -- hadn't read enough that wasn't fantasy/SF), I'm just waiting to see if they drop Paul Krugman as a columnist due to his own enthusiasm for science fiction... and this article from his misspent youth (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.2009.00225.x/full) (which actually dates from the beginning of his academic career, despite the "first published online" date stated on the webpage).