Game Of Thrones debuts tonight on HBO at 9 p.m. Eastern.
After half a decade of prep work and what feels like an even longer period of speculation, Game Of Thrones, HBO’s lavish adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire novels, has arrived complete with massive barrage of hype, befitting a channel that could use the copious amounts of cash it just has lying around to make an 80-hour miniseries about the life of John Quincy Adams acted out entirely by slowly melting ice sculptures if it wanted to. The amount of hype and the amount of backlash to the hype and the sheer weight of advance reviews makes it tempting for anyone to either review the commotion around the show or react to that commotion (or the devoted, cult-like fan base surrounding the books), and indeed, there have been more than a few pieces surrounding the idea of “what it all means” wandering the Internet for the last week, even though only a handful of people have seen a full episode.
Surprise, surprise, then, to see that the show at the center of the massive storm is, well, a typical HBO show. It tosses the audience into the deep end of the pool and expects at least a dog paddle. It’s got incredible production values, a seriously deep acting bench, and a vague sense that this isn’t a traditional TV series, but rather a 10-hour movie that doesn’t bother with anything like splitting the story into separate but equal episodes, which all tell an individual story, no matter how small. Even as other cable networks move toward a more standalone model—even shows like Breaking Bad and The Killing provide at LEAST a small goal for their protagonists to pull off in each individual episode—HBO has staked its claim on the ultra-dense, ultra-serialized side of the field. It’s almost impossible to know how to feel about individual episodes of shows like Treme or Boardwalk Empire or even True Blood, because the storytelling is so thoroughly geared toward the massive, toward telling a single story over the course of a season, or even a series.
Well, Game Of Thrones is richly in that tradition. (For a time, in fact, I considered not giving individual episodes of this season grades, instead thinking I might give the whole season a grade at the end.) At times, it almost feels like showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have arbitrarily come up with a handful of stopping points within the first novel in Martin’s cycle and dramatized the chapters between those stopping points. In the early going, especially, there’s no real attempt to craft stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, and even if you’ve read the books, it can be easy to be slightly overwhelmed by the sheer onslaught of information. When you further consider that the story has at least three dozen characters who are of some level of importance—at least two or three of whom are dead when the story begins (including a couple who’ve been dead for years)—the task Benioff and Weiss have undertaken becomes even more untenable. What’s amazing is not that Benioff and Weiss swerve so closely to all of this almost falling apart in the first six episodes, but that they somehow don’t. The deck was stacked against them, and despite a few close calls, they come out the other side with only a few small issues to show for it.
Sadly, tonight’s pilot—which will likely be the only taste many viewers ever get of the series—is the weakest of the first six. It’s so taken up with making sure everything is set in place that it largely forgets to do anything other than offer up a long series of stilted introductions. It’s smart about only introducing the characters viewers absolutely NEED to know to proceed in the series, but there are still roughly a dozen of these characters, and even with a one-hour, five-minute running time, it’s something of a sprint to the cliffhanger ending that actually kicks off the bulk of the story. This means that few of the characters register on a level deeper than “Hm. That guy seems cool.” There’s not a single scene here that lays out exactly what this show is going to be and exactly what it (and its characters’) worldview is, not on the level of, say, the lynching scene from the Deadwood pilot, the opening scene from The Wire's pilot, or even the scene where Don talks with the waiter about cigarettes in Mad Men. The great dramas often declare themselves somewhere in the pilot, staking out the territory they’re going to be playing around in, and while there are numerous cool moments in this pilot, there’s not one that reaches beyond the surface and attains the deeper pull of the thematically enriching.
If nothing else, the pilot is very smart about laying out who’s who and who you need to know right now (while also suggesting who will be important later, though you can catch up then). Sean Bean plays Eddard “Ned” Stark, the ruler of the far-off North, a land that seems to be peopled entirely with hardy fatalists, who work on their battle skills and murmur, “Winter is coming” to each other because they know there’s nothing so bad that it can’t get shittier. Ned’s a good guy, the kind of just ruler who does the right thing at every turn and seems destined to be exploited by other, more wicked people. His wife, Catelyn (also called Cat and played by Michelle Fairley), is the sort of rugged, tough woman Ned would be drawn to, and the two have five children, though the show is most interested in the four oldest ones: handsome, self-possessed Robb (Richard Madden); princess-in-training Sansa (Sophie Turner); tomboyish, courageous-to-a-fault Arya (Maisie Williams); and young, awesome-at-climbing Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright).
Most other networks might have stopped here. A large family trying to get by in a vaguely Middle Ages-esque fantasy kingdom? Great. But this is HBO, and the network wants us to get to know everybody in the whole kingdom (which is called Westeros, for those playing along at home). This starts at the Stark home of Winterfell, where we meet Ned’s bastard son, Jon Snow (Kit Harrington), who’s never known his mother and can still see the fury in Catelyn’s eyes over Ned’s betrayal of her. Jon’s about to take a military oath to join a long-standing, celibate brotherhood that stands atop a giant, icy wall and waits for an army of icy zombies, last seen thousands of years ago, to return. There are rumblings that said zombies HAVE returned, but are they just the words of underfunded, underfed men who never get to have sex and would like someone to at least pay a little attention? Or is the threat more serious than that?
At the same time, the king of the whole realm, Robert Barathaeon (Mark Addy) is rolling into Winterfell, complete with queen Cersei (Lena Headey); her brothers, preening warrior Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and sarcastic genius Tyrion (Peter Dinklage); and a job offer for Ned, which stands to split the family apart. (Much of this pivots on the very recent death of Jon Arryn, a man the king obviously trusted deeply.) Cersei and her brothers are of the rich, old Lannister family, one whose ties to the other families have always been tentative, though Cersei’s marriage to Robert seems to have mostly cemented those bonds for now. As it turns out, long ago, Ned, Robert, and Jaime fought alongside each other in a great war to depose the last king, the Mad King.
And at the same time, the series follows the final two children of that Mad King, sneering, sniveling Viserys (Harry Lloyd) and bargaining chip Daenerys (Emilia Clarke), who finds herself pushed into what’s essentially a slave marriage early in the first episode. She’s wed to the towering, terrifying Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa), who commands a massive army of his people, who are known as the Dothraki. The Dothraki are on an island not far from Westeros (as are Viserys and Daenerys, as well as a handful of loyalists to their deposed father), but they’re not regarded as a threat because of the narrow sea separating the two bodies of land.