Before Sunday night’s season finale of True Blood, HBO aired previews of several upcoming shows, including footage from next year’s fantasy saga Game of Thrones:
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Cannot. Wait. (Sidebar: Did we see that raven in the Six Feet Under credits, or is that a relative?) I won’t bother parsing the bits of footage frame-by-frame (Winter Is Coming is one fan blog that does a good job of that; also westeros.org), but overall I’m very encouraged by the visuals, which have the dirty look that Geroge R. R. Martin’s books convey.
Maybe even more important than the clips, though, is the GoT production blog that HBO also launched, as part of its ongoing effort to court and stoke the show’s built-in fan base months before it premieres.
The blog’s (spoiler-free) inaugural posts include, besides the trailer above, an intriguing featurette about the making of the show (now filming in Northern Ireland). And in their first post, producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss stress their fantasy-geek bona fides, which coincide with pretty much every interest of mine in my junior-high years. Ursula K. LeGuin. Stephen Donaldson. Dungeons and Dragons. The freaking Silmarillion.
That Benioff and Weiss are steeped in the minutiae of the Song of Ice and Fire source books, out of seemingly genuine fascination, is a good sign; the trick, of course, is to make a series that’s steeped in that knowledge without being enslaved by it. The books are great source material for a TV series, but ultimately they need to become a TV series—and thus a work unto themselves, albeit a faithful one.
Beyond pleasing the fans, there will be plenty of challenges in ensorceling newcomers. For starters (without getting into spoilers), the trick of maintaining interest in a narrative that introduces a range of characters, then sends them off on very far-flung (though related and sometimes intersecting) storylines. There’s also the matter of expectations: Martin himself references this in the making-of clip so I don’t think this is a spoiler, but the fact that there is relatively little “magic”—as in spells or whatnot—especially in the early going may come as a surprise to viewers expecting an early trip to Ollivander’s Wand Shop. (Really, in many ways the saga is about a world that believes the glory days of magic are past.)
But having the ur-fans on their side from the start (or before) would be a big help. And they’re certainly sparing no effort. If you’re still curious, here’s that making-of featurette:
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