Will fans of Game of Thrones be disappointed this coming Sunday?

Like most George R. R. Martin fans, I spend a lot of nights up late, worried about the future. I worry that splitting the fourth book in the series into two volumes was a mistake that the series will never recover from. I worry that the combination of Martin’s travel, his age, his weight, and what I assume is the unending stream of forty-something Renaissance Faire women willing to “take M’lord abedding”, that he simply won’t live long enough to actually finish the series.

Lately, though, I’ve been most worried about the new Game of Thrones HBO series. Westeros is a place that’s lived in my imagination for years; if HBO screwed up just a few details, it’d be the biggest disappointment I’ve had since realizing just how much hair puberty had in store for me.

I imagine I’m not alone in this. If you’re a fan of the book, the idea of a TV series is concerning, not because you don’t want your favorite fantasy series branching out into new worlds, but because TV has a long history of taking things that are awesome and destroying them. Remember The Stand on ABC in 1994? No, of course you don’t, because your brain wiped it from memory in an attempt to save itself the horror of Jamey Sheridan’s Randall Flag.

For the TV version of Game of Thrones not to suck, it would have to answer a few questions convincingly:

1) Would HBO shy away from the fact that the books averaged nine beheadings, three sex scenes, and a child murder every chapter?

2) Would the budget allow for a full realization of the meticulously detailed world of Westeros, or would the show look like “Country with TV Tax Incentives X?”

3) Would they be smart enough to cast the only person any of us ever imagined as Tyrion as Tyrion? (This is known, incidentally as the “Patrick Stewart as Professor X” corollary. That is, if everyone in America familiar with the subject matter instantly comes up with the same casting choice every time a character is mentioned and you as a studio executive don’t cast that person as the character, you should not only be fired but also forced to eat a jar of mayonnaise that’s been left outside in the hot New Mexican sun).

The answers in short order: no, yes, and Peter Goddamn Dinklage!

Ladies and Gentleman, HBO absolutely nailed it.

Let’s start with the casting. Peter Dinklage is Tyrion (as he was born to be), and there isn’t a misstep in the bunch. Martin apparently did a lot of the casting himself (because he’ll do anything instead of finish “A Dance with Dragons” — seriously, go to his house right now and ask him to help you move, he’ll be happy to) and it shows. Everyone is so perfectly cast it feels like the books were written after the series. I realize it sounds like I’m a paid shill for HBO right now, but I’m absolutely amazed at how perfectly each member embodies the characters I’ve had in my head so long.

The budget, meanwhile, isn’t infinite — which it would have to be to actually show us 40,000 Dothraki riding on horseback — but it’s enough to give us a sense of the epic sweep of the series. There were only a few times when I was able to call out “obvious computer graphic” or “hey, look, they said ‘hundreds’ but what they really meant was ‘twelve extras,’” and that’s all that I really wanted from the series.

And finally, HBO makes good use of the freedom of pay cable to show all the nasty things that Martin crams into the corners of his books. Maybe that sounds crass, but a Westeros without graphic incest isn’t a Westeros I want to live in.

This leaves us just one more question: how does the complicated mythology of the Song of Ice and Fire handle the translation into TV?

The answer to that is somewhat more complicated because I’m a fanatic about these books. What I mean is that the motivations and back stories of all the major players are woven into my DNA at this point; I can tell you more about Samwell Tarly than I can tell you about anyone in my own family.

It’s difficult for me to say, then, just how well they manage the mythology. The parts were so well cast that whenever a character appeared, I knew instantly who they were and what they wanted. So, I was never confused and always entertained.

I can’t say that this will be the case for anyone who hasn’t read the books or for even the casual fans who last visited the series when the fourth book was released back in … I think it was 1897 or ‘98.

That’ll be something the formal review will handle next week when the series premieres. My job was just to tell the nerds if they’ll be nerdgasming come Sunday … and my answer is this:

You’re gonna need some Gallagher-style tarp for your living room.

Clacked by Jay Black
on Apr 13, 2011 @ 15:00 EST5EDT