The preceding post was about Dorne and the throne. Nuff said.
BTW, what time EST on Sunday will the show premiere? How long will each episode be? How often will it air? Thanks!
On HBO Canada HD it’s 8:00pm Pacific and reran directly afterwards and again at 12:45am and again after that. And then again at 7:00pm & 9:55pm Monday. Should be easy not too miss I hope they continue to rerun new episodes this much since I don’t have a DVR.
I think HBO Canada has the same schedule as the US. But I’m not 100% sure.
It looks like my HBO HD channel is showing the first episode three times back-to-back on Sunday night. 
My DVR thinks the first episode is an hour and 5 minutes long.
If you subscribe to HBO, there’s no way you can miss one of their shows. They’ll repeat each episode a dozen times over the week, and then a few weeks from now they will show marathons of the first x episodes.
Thanks. How many episodes in the first season, then?
I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the first episode (Titled “Winter is Coming”) is indeed an hour & 5 minutes long.
And ** Elendil’s Heir**, there’s 10 episodes in the first season.
Ten.
Didn’t watch the preview, but so far I’m most impressed with the photos of the throne on the promo material – a huge thing made of knives and swords, uncomfortable both literally and figuratively.
Anyone know if the episodes will be available on-line? I can’t find anything on HBO’s website.
Alan Sepinwall just gave the show his blessings.
I guess I’ll be watching it.
That’s a great sign. Sepinwall’s my favourite TV critic. Sadly I’ll have to wait for the DVDs to reach NZ.
Ten it is, yes, thanks. The first broadcast is at 9pm EST tonight. Looking forward to it.
I finished re-reading book 1 yesterday, so I’m all set for tonight!
I’m debating if I should re-read books 2-4 in anticipation for July, or wait until after the season is over, so I’m not trying to follow two different storylines at the same time.
I’m thinking it might not matter too much; we don’t know, yet, how closely to the books the series is going to go.
I would guess they will veer away from the books over time. I suppose that even the major death of Book One may be avoided(though it would punch a ton of people in the stomach if they do it).
Not a chance. The rest of the story beyond that point would have to be completely different. I’d instantly stop caring about the HBO series if they did.
From all accounts, the show will stick pretty close to the books.
I’m pretty pumped, but my cable won’t be installed until next week. I’ll be scrounging for scraps until then grumble grumble
I don’t think they’d change those major deaths. Those radical events are an essential hook of the books - the particular death we’re talking about establishes that no character is safe. Characters in jeopardy are really in jeopardy.
The other hook is the lack of clear moral divisions between the characters. No unambiguous “good and evil” sides, and even individual characters can shift their weight from leaning morally one way to leaning the other way.
These elements combined make for a project that can work really well as an episodic telvision show. It’s not predictable. If they were to remove that element, they would be pissing off their fanbase too much and basically ignoring the core elemnts of conventional sytorytelling that GRRM has been experiementing with.
I trust HBO to capture the essential elements correctly, and the to follow the basic outlines of the book. I don’t expect it to be a line for line, painstakingly literal rendition of every word. I suspect some plot threads might be greatly truncated, collapsed or removed altogether, but I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing for this project. I think even most of the biggest fans admit that some things could stand to be tightened up about it.
Oh man, I’ve been so bummed–I don’t have HBO, and as I’m moving out in less than 2 weeks I couldn’t justify adding it, so I was going to catch it On Demand tomorrow, lno just informed me that Cox is doing a HBO free preview weekend! It looks like I get HBO right now, so here’s hoping…
I sure hope this is good. HBO’s last effort, Boardwalk Empire, just didn’t do it for me. I had never even heard of the books, and have absolutely no preconception of what the plot should or shouldn’t be.
Thanks for the tip! Fios is doing it too. I get to watch the first episode at least, and I’ll wait for DVD for the rest, assuming I can resist getting HBO after seeing it. (Which would probably be the point. If the free preview weekend and the premiere of GoT being on the same weekend are a coincidence, I’ll eat my tivo.)
Thoughts on a new thread for each episode, or having this as a general thread?
That’s OK, man, those of us who have read the four books four times each will let you know. 
Given that a publication date for the fifth book has been announced by the publisher, I have not cancelled HBO, and I will be watching tonight.
Yep.
Folks need to keep in mind that this series is entirely based on A Game of Thrones.