I can not honestly recommend the series yet as I am only about 1/2 done with the book on which the first season is based. However tonight HBO starts the long awaited "Game of Thrones" miniseries. It's based on the book by George RR Martin.
Martin is an incredibly long winded and dense writer (think Dickens or Dumas) who has a rather annoying penchant for introducing new characters every 3-4 pages. But he is a great storyteller and I think that this series, if done correctly , could be a win for HBO.
It's "fantasy" but the real meat of the story is in quite mundane and realistic bitter and murderous rivalries between noble families for power over each other and ultimately the royal throne. It's not a simplistic tale of good and evil since even the "good" people tend to be somewhat self-interested and just about anyone will try to have you knocked off if they think it's in their family's interest.
This could be described as Tolkien for adults. One "good" father insists his young son witness a public execution so that he toughens up and understands what justice means. A "bad" father, disgusted with his first born son's lack of martial desires and general sloth quietly threatens his eldest with a promise of slow dismemberment unless he gives up his succession claim in favor of his younger but more traditionally masculine brother.
I would not have made the comparison but one NYT writer drew a parallel between this story and The Sopranos. YMMV. I hope to finish the first book sometime this week and perhaps will do a review.
As it turns out, adapting George R. R. Martin’s epic “Song of Ice and Fire” fiction series for premium cable amounts to such good, simple sense that it’s stunning that there aren’t more fantasy series on TV. Considering the falling cost of C.G.I. effects and the rising popularity of the (loosely defined) fantasy genre — like “Heroes” on NBC, “Lost” on ABC and the hit “Battlestar Galactica” on Syfy — it’s remarkable that networks still seem content to mostly loop the same Mobius strip of programming: detectives puzzling, lawyers pacing, sitcom dads making sitcom children roll their eyes.
Meanwhile, cable TV continues its romance with ancient history. But it doesn’t take more than a glance at the melodramatic “The Tudors” (soft porn trussed up in intricate period costume) or “The Borgias” (soft porn trussed up in papal robes), both on Showtime, or HBO’s forgettable “Rome” (predictable betrayals spiced up with toga parties) or Starz’s man-meat festival “Spartacus” (proving vengeance is a dish best served with rock-hard glutes) to recognize the limits of this love affair — whether it’s a not-exactly-historically-accurate, lean and hungry King Henry VIII or an ancient Roman who proclaims, “Good stuff!” after puffing on some imperial bud. By contrast, fantasy writers are free to roam, fueled by imagination and heedless of the stringent requirements of history. Armed with menacing zombies, dagger-wielding assassins and merciless warriors on horseback, the fantasy writer can do a singular kind of justice to the raw bewilderment and barbarism of our own times.
This is why, with “Game of Thrones,” HBO may have at last found a natural heir to “The Sopranos.” If “The Sopranos” was a timely parable about the crumbling state of the American family, “Game of Thrones” is a timely fable of sweeping global destruction and doom. “Winter is coming,” the rather sulky denizens of the imaginary land of Westeros repeat to each other, and these words eerily echo the gathering gloom of our contemporary predicament, from the global financial crisis to nuclear meltdown to widespread revolution....
"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." Winter is Coming Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
