The Book Pilgrim

I’ve been pretty excited about this for some time now, but heard recently that HBO officially gave the Game of Thrones mini-series the green light.

The only problems? It won’t air until 2011. And, I don’t have HBO.

Photo and below text copied from The Watcher: I so agree with the last two points!

HBO has given a green light to “Game of Thrones,” one of the most hotly anticipated shows the network has ever made. The network has committed to the pilot plus nine additional episodes.
The pilot for “Thrones” was shot in Northern Ireland and other European and North African locations in late 2009. Production will resume in June in Northern Ireland. It’s expected that the show will arrive on HBO in the spring of 2011, but no firm date has been set.
HBO’s description of the series: “Based on the series of books by George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones is an epic struggle for power set in a vast and violent fantasy kingdom.”
Above is the first image from the series, which was shot in Belfast, Northern Ireland (presumably not in the city center).

My own take? I do have a few thoughts, thanks for asking:

• This is great news; I’m doing a little happy dance myself. If the drama is two-thirds as good as Martin’s novels, it’ll be very good indeed.
• I’m glad we don’t have to wait on pins and needles any more to find out if it got picked up! HBO said the decision on “GoT” would come in March and I’m glad they didn’t make us wait until the end of the month.
• Now begins another waiting game. I don’t want to have to remind myself of this, but we will have to wait a year to see “GoT.” That won’t be easy, and I hope that we can keep our expectations in check, up to a point. When it arrives in 2011, I hope myself and my fellow Martin fans haven’t worked ourselves into such a lather that anything short of “The Wire” set in the world of knights and dragons will seem like a letdown.
• About those dragons. Yes, people use the “fantasy” label to describe “Game of Thrones.” That’s like describing “The Wire” as a cop drama and “Deadwood” as just another Western. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” novel series transcends labels by telling compelling stories about complicated people and the extremely difficult moral and personal choices they have to make. That’s all I ask of any drama.
• Having said that, I do hope that “Game of Thrones” does for fantasy what “Battlestar Galactica” did for sci-fi on TV: Make people sit up and take notice of a good yarn, well told — a yarn that does not deserve to be dismissed as genre fare. Let’s hope “GoT” will be worth the wait.