I have a bunch of half-written, unpublished posts on this blog. Or two of them. One is on how
The Newsroom works better for a non-American audience, the other is on the recent Netflix produced version of
House of Cards, which ran on Foxtel throughout May and June. Over the last two years I have become a fan of an increasing number of TV shows. Last November I went through a breakup and I started watching a lot of new things. One thing I was never able to get into was
Game of Thrones. I understand the premise: there are a bunch of families, or houses as they're called in the series, and they're all competing for the Iron Throne. My ex-boyfriend showed me the pilot and what I remember are: a guy dies in the very first scene; it is snowing in that scene; there were lots of boobs; there are people having sex and a boy sees them because he climbed up a tower and at the end someone pushed him off. For most of the episode, I had trouble keeping track of who was who, and my boyfriend told me that the kid lived, so there was nothing keeping me interested past that point. I've also been spoiled for most plot points such that I'm able to understand most of the references in
Bunheads, which is pretty much my favourite show that is in danger of being cancelled. (I saw
Bunheads before I saw
Gilmore Girls and I relate much more to
Bunheads, which is why it is my favourite). So anyway, I am pretty much spoiled for the first three seasons. Here is what I know:
- Ned Stark is beheaded in the first season.
- There is a kid named Joffrey who is basically the fictional version of Justin Bieber (you're welcome), and everyone hates him
- Daenerys has dragons
- A bunch of people die in what is known as The Red Wedding (because I live on Twitter, I basically spoiled myself on this one because I don't particularly care about the show that much)
- There is a wall and things happen beyond it.
- Arya Stark seems pretty awesome and from what various critics have said about her. This is pretty much why I'm interested in the show.
- The actor who plays Sam in Love, Actually is in it.
The problem is, I didn't like that pilot. I feel like I'm the only one -
Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in Australia. TV Critics love it, my friends who have seen it love it, but I had no reason to keep going. So I'm going to watch the first season all the way through and see if I change my mind. I'm limiting myself to one episode per weekday over a two week period. I'm not going to do an episode by episode analysis, because if you want to read that, there are fantastic reviews over at the AV Club by
Todd VanDerWerff and
David Sims, as well as
Alan Sepinwall,
Mo Ryan (the Huffington Post website doesn't do categories the way I'd like them, so I'm just linking you to her page),
Myles McNutt and probably a number of TV critics whose work I haven't read.
I'll probably write posts after episodes 1, 5, 9 and 10. The experiment is to see if I like it at the end of the season. So for the first episode I'll try and work out what's going on and see whether I liked it more than I did on the initial viewing, and I know that episode 9 is when big things happen. The posts of episodes 5 and 10 will go up on Fridays and they will be more about how I feel about the season as a whole.
