Sunday, April 1, 2012

Game of Thrones -- finally!


Finally, our long national nightmare is over and the new season of Game of Thrones premiered tonight.

I'm not going to rehash the episode, but will mention that after reading the first two books in George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice epic, that I'm fairly impressed with how well the show's creators hew to the source material.

I am pleased with some of the casting of the new characters, particularly Liam Cunningham as Davos, the Onion Knight and Carice van Houten as Melisandre, the sorceress who bewitches Stannis Baratheon.

liam cunningham & carice van houten

Cunningham's a sturdy character actor who's been in tons of stuff, most recently the Clash of the Titans remake. And I just saw van Houten in the unknown and underrated Black Death. She played a witch in that as well and that movie starred Sean Bean, so there's tons of synchronicity at work here. Surely unintentional, but amusing to me none the less.



One downer for the night was a couple of previews that came on right before the show. HBO has two new series coming up -- one about an apparently conservative newsman who has a meltdown and begins speaking truth to power via liberal talking points, of course. I'm guessing this is their sort of Bill O'Reilly becomes Joe Scarborough show.

The other is about a ditzy Vice President who doesn't know what the acronym NASA stands for and is a complete incompetent diva. Clearly another knock at Sarah Palin.

*sigh*

After the laughable mess of Recount and the critically panned in-kind political contribution Game Change, you would think the honchos at HBO would get off it for a bit. But I guess not.

Well, they've got me for one show. But I wouldn't watch the rest of their liberal b.s. line-up if you put a gun to my head.

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