Game of Thrones [SPOILERS]

[Morfiend]

Not.  Just buy the DVD set if it gets good enough reviews here.  It'll cost you less and there won't be the annoying delays between episodes.  That's my plan at least.

I don't think you will be saving much money...HBO DVDs are notoriously overpriced. If you got it for < $50 I would be surprised, which is about what 3 months of HBO would get you. That also gives you access to their entire On Demand library (at least on Comcast), so you could watch a lot of their other programming. I am still trying to find a WORKING (long story) full series set of The Wire for less than $120 if possible, and that is several years old by now.

Yes, this was kind of my calculation... $48 for 3 months.. a bonus is all the extra HBO stuff .. so yeah, gonna go for it.

Thanks for the opinions in any case.

If your cable company offers InDemand, you can now go back and watch a bunch of other HBO shows there when you are subscribed.

[WayAbvPar]

I have been watching all the little featurettes (to coin a word) available on Comcast On Demand the past week or so; also re-reading the books to get ready for the premiere. It really looks like they nailed it. The EP/writers/showrunners really seem to understand and respect the source material and are committed to doing to justice. Just a few more days now!

[Samwise]

Not.  Just buy the DVD set if it gets good enough reviews here.  It'll cost you less and there won't be the annoying delays between episodes.  That's my plan at least.

I don't think you will be saving much money...HBO DVDs are notoriously overpriced. If you got it for < $50 I would be surprised, which is about what 3 months of HBO would get you. That also gives you access to their entire On Demand library (at least on Comcast), so you could watch a lot of their other programming. I am still trying to find a WORKING (long story) full series set of The Wire for less than $120 if possible, and that is several years old by now.

Yes, this was kind of my calculation... $48 for 3 months.. a bonus is all the extra HBO stuff .. so yeah, gonna go for it.

Thanks for the opinions in any case.

If your cable company offers InDemand, you can now go back and watch a bunch of other HBO shows there when you are subscribed.

Or you can get a $9 Netflix subscription.     Even if it's not available on streaming, they'll have the DVDs and you won't have to pay $50 to watch them.

[Draegan]

So I'm getting married the day this airs.   

I'll have to wait a few until I get to see it.

[WayAbvPar]

HBO will run it 649376397397539573-07 times (a conservative guess) in the next week, so you should probably be able to find it. They are running it 3x consecutively on Sunday alone, FFS.

[JWIV]

So I'm getting married the day this airs.  

I'll have to wait a few until I get to see it.

Why? Does your hotel not have free HBO?   

[Nyght]

Disks are out to the reviews and the first reviews are starting to hit. A fawning one here:

http://www.cinemablend.com/television/Game-Thrones-Review-Winter-Coming-Series-Premiere-31310.html

I read one other that was negative, although the author admitted from the start he didn't like the genre. Keep your eyes open for more please.

[Arthur_Parker]

So I'm getting married the day this airs.  

I'll have to wait a few until I get to see it.

Why? Does your hotel not have free HBO?   

I read Storm of Swords on honeymoon.

[WayAbvPar]

Disks are out to the reviews and the first reviews are starting to hit. A fawning one here:

http://www.cinemablend.com/television/Game-Thrones-Review-Winter-Coming-Series-Premiere-31310.html

I read one other that was negative, although the author admitted from the start he didn't like the genre. Keep your eyes open for more please.

If that was the one on Slate, ugh. That guy is a huge tool.

[Nyght]

I read one other that was negative, although the author admitted from the start he didn't like the genre. Keep your eyes open for more please.

If that was the one on Slate, ugh. That guy is a huge tool.

Yah, thats the one. He actually has about three sentences about the movie. Most of it is about himself.

Edited to add: Ha! Free HBO weekend. I can put it off until I've seen the first one.

[naum]

It is tempting to subscribe to HBO just for this.

Also, this made me LOL.


 

[Der Helm]

I AM AN ATAVISTIC EXAMPLE OF MY SPECIES - NYUAAAARRGGGHRARR.

[Merusk]

Edited to add: Ha! Free HBO weekend. I can put it off until I've seen the first one.

Bah, lucky. No free HBO weekend here.

As for the price of DVDs vs HBO: I don't watch enough TV to justify $48 for "all the great stuff."  I see HBO on my Guide and it's never got more than a few things I'd want to watch. Those that it does I can also get from Netflix. 

Also, if you buy the DVDs early or at the right places, you can get a great deal on them, particularly the week of release.   Best Buy usually does an early-buyer price and I've got plenty of reward bucks to cash in for more off.  I won't be spending $50 on it.  Hell, even Amazon has Rome for $27 per season now.

[Nyght]

One thing I should mention I guess is, I can't stream. I live in a rural location and my internet is Evdo with a 5 gig cap.

My GF has a netflix account and we get dvds weekly. So yeah, I could wait for that and just get them this fall or whenever they get released.

Still deciding and now I have another week to put the decision off. Life is good.

[Johny Cee]

Edited to add: Ha! Free HBO weekend. I can put it off until I've seen the first one.

Bah, lucky. No free HBO weekend here.

As for the price of DVDs vs HBO: I don't watch enough TV to justify $48 for "all the great stuff."  I see HBO on my Guide and it's never got more than a few things I'd want to watch. Those that it does I can also get from Netflix. 

Also, if you buy the DVDs early or at the right places, you can get a great deal on them, particularly the week of release.   Best Buy usually does an early-buyer price and I've got plenty of reward bucks to cash in for more off.  I won't be spending $50 on it.  Hell, even Amazon has Rome for $27 per season now.

HBO DVDs have come way down in price, mostly.  I've picked up alot of shows I want to re-watch when they hit the $20-30 price from either Target, Best Buy, or Amazon.  That includes Deadwood, Carnivale, Rome, etc.  Gave Entourage a shot when it was like $15/season.  The Wire is usually $30/season, but it occasionally drops below that if you hit the timing right.  The days where HBO could charge $80 a season and people would buy it are dead and gone.

If you're smart and make occasional sweeps for big deals, you can get things when they hit clearance and save big time.  I have a couple of friends that also play DVD bargain hunter, so between us we can swap shows around.

HBO is often in the top tier of TV packages, too... that means shelling out for a bunch of other channels you probably have no interest in watching.  You are pretty much shelling out big money to watch one show as it's aired. 

Best bang for TV buck is really just the "basic" cable package which usually includes stations up to FX and AMC (who are easily THE outlets for quality TV), and wait for other things to hit clearance after you have an idea about quality.

Sopranos was largely HBOs one and only watercooler show, where you HAD to watch it as episodes came out. 

[Lucas]

Can't wait 

On monday morning (CET) I'll immediately download it 

(well, after all, here in Italy no television has picked it up, yet; we'll probably have to wait until september. So, since I would like to watch it along with you guys across the narrow sea pond, and I also like to watch tv shows in native language, that's the only way I can do it).

Oh, by the way: HBO Official Viewers Guide. VERY nice:

http://viewers-guide.hbo.com/game-of-thrones/


A totally stupid review by NY Times' Ginia Bellafante:

http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/arts/television/game-of-thrones-begins-sunday-on-hbo-review.html?smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

Which generated quite a bit of anger and annoyance among fans (of course), women, and Martin himself:

http://grrm.livejournal.com/210874.html
---

Yes folks, apparently anyone who likes fantasy is still ye olde teenage geek living in the basement, rolling dices, roleplaying a dwarf, with the potential of becoming a serial killer when he grows up. The seventies-eighties all over again.

[Merusk]

The Times has sanitized the review, there are 0 user comments. 

Then again, what more do you expect from a reviewer who complains that they have to keep track of more than 5 characters by stating, "Keeping track of the principals alone feels as though it requires the focused memory of someone who can play bridge at a Warren Buffett level of adeptness. "

Perhaps if she played more bridge and watched less TV it wouldn't be so daunting.  Or hell, read a goddamn book once in a while.

[Ghambit]

[Abagadro]

I was pretty lost. Lots of exposition goes by really really fast in various forms of accents.  I'm sure it will unfold a bit and I will continue watching but I had to rewind it a bunch to catch stuff and still didn't get all of it.

[Khaldun]

I get that infodumps are bad, but it wouldn't have hurt to have found a moment for inventing a longer scene with some clever expository dialogue in the middle, a scene between two self-aware characters who don't really interact that way in the book. Tyrion and Benjen Stark, maybe. Or hell, have Eddard start off with a bit of "We're the Starks, we guard the North, but once I went south to fight the Mad King, who killed my sister, and I never want to go south again" or somesuch.

[Threash]

I was pretty lost. Lots of exposition goes by really really fast in various forms of accents.  I'm sure it will unfold a bit and I will continue watching but I had to rewind it a bunch to catch stuff and still didn't get all of it.

To be fair you'd be just as lost at the start of the book also.  They throw a ton of characters with tons of previous history between them at you with no exposition there either.  The payoff is worth it.

[naum]

As I was watching, wondered why I hadn't thought previously of how difficult it would be to translate the backstory to video form. I don't know that they succeeded.

Also, I probably in the minority, but the gratuitous T&A is a bit more graphic than in the novel form.

And some of the casting just doesn't jive for me -- Ned,  Daenerys, and most egregious Jaime Lannister. Others OK -- Sansa, Jon Snow, Cersei, Catelyn -- only little Arya and Tyrion and maybe Robert seem to match what I conjured from reading the books (which could be totally baseless, I freely confess ;().

                      

[Margalis]

Vaguely related but I read the first book then stopped because my Spider Sense told me it was one of those series that was never going to end. I don't really get turning book 1 into a series. The first book basically feels like a prologue, or half a prologue. So it's hard to imagine getting to the end of the TV series and being satisfied, especially when you know that realistically the written series is never going to end and even if it does the chance of it turning into a complete TV series before 2020 is basically zero.

I have it DVR'd but I think I might just delete it. It sounds like the only real fun of it is just the novelty of it existing.

[Morfiend]

Everyone in my Sunday TV group loved it. Was about half and half people who had read the books and people who hadnt.

I kept wanting to stop and explain backstory, but found that the people who hadnt read the books didnt want it, they wanted it to unfold for them.

As far as casting goes, I thought Sean Bean was spot on. The major ones that seemed off to me where Cersei and Jamie Lanester and Rob Stark. I felt that the Lanesters should have been a bit more effeminate. I pictured Jamie being almost "elfin" with a lot more blonde hair, and Rob being a bit more rough, and for some reason I thought he had red hair.

[Arthur_Parker]

All dwarfs are bastards in their father's eyes

Thought it was great I'm also really enjoying seeing the Ulster of Cú Chulainn in the background of this story.

Edit to add.

It was always going to be difficult to translate this to a tv show, Rob Stark didn't stand out to me either but how many strong characters can they introduce in the first episode and not put people off?  Eddard, Robert, Arya, Tyrion & Jaime I thought came across great, Cersei I don't like anyway.

[Arthur_Parker]

Thought some of this was funny.

http://geeknotgeek.blogspot.com/2011/04/26-things-i-learned-from-game-of.html

[Khaldun]

Jaime is supposed to be a pretty boy, golden, gets along easily with everyone, light-hearted--it's with the pushing-out-the-window that you get a very abruptly different sense of what's going on. And then later on, a different sense again as the character gets more complicated.

[Threash]

The show is going to have to last for years for the prologue to make a lick of sense to anyone who didn't read the books.

[Mrbloodworth]

I was not really impressed.

[Nyght]

I enjoyed it. Not overwhelmed for sure and not sure I will pay to see it as it is released.

I cannot understand how anybody who has not read the books could follow it. Some critical plot points were pass out in a single word of dialogue.

meh   

[murdoc]

I liked it, but I think I liked it because I really WANT to like it.

I can't imagine watching it without an understanding of the books. So many characters are thrown at you and last names mentioned in the prologue come back in later books. I'll be interested to watch the Kings Hand tournament as even the small bit players barely mentioned become more important and bigger plot points in later books.

[Mrbloodworth]

Having not read the books. Rome, Spartacus, and a number of others were better pilots.  I'm not felling this, seems like some generic fantasy, oh, and rapeings.

[Arthur_Parker]

Having not read the books. Rome, Spartacus, and a number of others were better pilots.  I'm not felling this, seems like some generic fantasy, oh, and rapeings.

If you stick with it, I'd like you to post your feelings after the 6th episode has aired.  It's a dense plot with lots of characters so I'm actually kinda envious of people who haven't read the books.

[Mrbloodworth]

Well, if the free HBO is over, I won't be able to get that far.

[Tale]

I really liked it.

Strip away all the expectations and hype, and it stands. It's good. I haven't read the books.